School of Geography and the Environment

Food systems and security in a changing climate

ECI are host to the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) project, an international, interdisciplinary research project focussed on understanding the links between food security and global environmental change. The GECAFS Goal is to determine strategies to cope with the impacts of global environmental change on food systems and to assess the environmental and socio-economic consequences of adaptive responses aimed at improving food security.

Research focus

Dr Polly Ericksen has spent the past 4.5 years working with the GECAFS project. Her research looks at how climate change affects the vulnerability of food systems and food security (i.e. the access to food as well as nutritional value of food). She has published several papers on these issues, and supported research teams in Southern Africa, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and the Caribbean to undertake analyses of these issues in each specific regional context.

Polly is currently focused on the institutional and policy issues which need to be addressed in order to create an enabling environment for the sustainable adaptation of food systems. These options span the full spectrum from new technologies to institutional reform and better policy development and implementation. The GECAFS’ approach also emphasizes decision support, using participatory scenario development to engage multiple stakeholders and explore plausible food system futures given the high uncertainty surrounding the pathways and consequences of environmental, social and political change. It is important to create processes of dialogue among stakeholders with competing priorities and visions for agriculture and food security. Research already suggests that adaptation strategies implemented by one group may increase the vulnerability of those with less access to resources. Other evidence strongly suggests that many current interventions to enhance agricultural production in response to climate variability and land degradation are likely to negatively affect ecosystem services; agriculture is one of the major drivers of global environmental change. More than 50 years of development and research have taught us that farmers must work with scientists for agricultural development options to benefit the poor; in the food security domain we know that poor institutional coordination and reactive policy and planning frameworks cripple responses; and more recent lessons about using climate information have demonstrated that the “usefulness” of such information depends largely on the efforts to understand “end-user” perspectives, constraints and priorities. Managing a range of tradeoffs among food security, agricultural growth, and diminishing vulnerability to climate change will require applying all of the lessons from adaptive management approaches at local levels, and scaling these up to encompass institutional and policy reform at national, regional and even international levels.