The Global Crop Modeling Project (GCMP): Climate Change Adaptation and Risk Assessments for Agriculture.

The Global Crop Modeling Project (GCMP): Climate Change Adaptation and Risk Assessments for Agriculture Cynthia Rosenzweig, James W. Jones, Jerry L. Hatfield, Alex Ruane, and Cheryl Porter May 7th, 2007 The overall goal of the GCMP is to improve substantially the characterization of impacts, adaptation, risk of hunger and world food security due to climate change. The GCMP will conduct distributed climate scenario-based simulations to enable model intercomparison and improvements, and to project future climate change impacts and adaptations with participation by multiple crop and world food trade modeling groups around the world. The aim is to place regional changes in agricultural production in a global context that reflects new trading opportunities, imbalances, and shortages in world markets resulting from climate change. The project will greatly increase understanding of short and long-term climate risk and adaptation potential for agriculture at regional and global scales by incorporating advances in climate and agronomic data and models that have been achieved over the past 10 years. The Global Crop Modeling Project will significantly enhance information (including uncertainty estimates) to guide policymakers regarding risk of hunger, world food security, and agricultural adaptation. A key aspect is to create capacity-building partnerships among agricultural crop and economic modelers around the world, enhancing the ability of each nation to evaluate current and future climate impacts and adaptations. The GCMP will also build the capabilities of developing countries to estimate how climate change will affect their own supply and demand for food. Results will also set the context for local-scale vulnerability and adaptation studies, supply test scenarios for national-scale development of trade policy instruments, provide critical information on changing supply and demand for water resources, and elucidate interactive effects of climate change and land use change. GCMP goals, activities, and opportunities for participation will be described.