‘Closing the loop’ in understanding adaptation of agriculture to climate change

This project, part of a programme of work by the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), aims to integrate top-down quantitative and bottom-up qualitative assessments of the capacity for agricultural and food production systems to adapt to climate change.  Early findings  from fieldwork in Malawi and Botswana suggest that at household level middle income groups are more vulnerable to drought than low or high income groups.  Complementary research carried out examining countries suggests a similar result.  Although the contexts are different for households as compared to countries, we hypothesize that as households and societies transition from subsistence agricultural economies to modernised monetary economies an unstable period occurs when new strategies to cope with drought stress have yet to be developed and adopted.

The first crop model experiments accounting for both socioeconomic and biophysical adaptive capacity in China show that without adaptation crop failures rates will increase under future climate scenarios.  But with both socioeconomic and biophysical (water and temperature) adaptation future crop failure rates could be reduced to below current levels.

Recent publications

Simelton et al. (2010) Climate change and the socioeconomics of global food production: A quantitative analysis of how socioeconomic factors influence the vulnerability of grain crops to drought. CCCEP Working Paper 29. 

Challinor et al (2010) Increased crop failure due to climate change: assessing adaptation options using models and socio-economic data for wheat in China.  Environmental Research Letters.

(for which Elisabeth Simelton was awarded runner-up in Lloyd’s Science Prize of Risk 2010 in the “Climate Change” category).

Simelton (2011) Food self-sufficiency and natural hazards in China. Food Security.

Next activities

Evan Fraser, Claire Quinn, Elisabeth Simelton, Andy Challinor and Philip Antwei will present results at the Resilience conference in Arizona in March 2011.