Page 313 - Climate Change and Food Systems

chapter 10
The role of international trade under a changing climate: Insights from global economic modelling1
Helal Ahammad(a), Edwina Heyhoe(a), Gerald Nelson(b),
Ronald Sands(c), Shinichiro Fujimori(d),Tomoko Hasegawa(d), Dominique van der Mensbrugghe(e), Elodie Blanc(f),
Petr Havlik(g), Hugo Valin(g), Page Kyle(h), Daniel Mason d’Croz(i), Hans van Meijl(j), Christoph Schmitz(k), Herman Lotze-Campen(k), Martin von Lampe(l), Andrzej Tabeau(j)
main chapter messages
■ The likely impacts of future climate change and socio-economic drivers on international trade in agrifood commodities would vary depending on assumptions regarding how the future will evolve as encapsulated by ‘scenarios’.
■ The projected agrifood trade impacts are also likely to vary across economic models, depending on model types and underlying theoretical structures.
■ To improve understanding on why simulated impacts differ across models under specific
‘scenarios’, results from a recent AgMIP (Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project) economic modelling exercise are used, with particular focus on the agriculture sector.
■ The analysis presented in this chapter suggests an increasing role for trade under future climate change but the extent of the change in agrifood trade varies substantially between models.
■ Based on the insights from the analysis, a number of potential issues are recommended for future modelling and research.
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This paper is part of a global economic model intercomparison activity undertaken as part of the AgMIP Project (www.agmip.org). The climate change drivers collectively known as MIP were provided as part of the ISI-MIP model comparison project (www.isi-mip.org). The socio-economic drivers were developed for the Shared Socio- economic Pathways (SSP) as part of a new set of IPCC scenarios for analyses of climate impacts, adaptation and mitigation, and are available at the SSP data portal (https://secure.iiasa.ac.at/web-apps/ene/)
Authors affiliations are as follow: (a) Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences; (b) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; (c) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service; (d) National Institute for Environmental Studies; (e) Global Analysis Project, Purdue University; (f) Massachusetts Institute of Technology; (g) International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis; (h) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; (i) International Food Policy Research Institute; (j) LEI Part of Wageningen University; (k) Potsdam Institut für Klimafolgenforschung; (l) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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