Scenarios Research
GECAFS is concerned with medium- to long-term prospects for food security in the context of GEC. Prediction involves considerable uncertainties and hence GECAFS studies will need to be set within clearly defined, plausible alternative futures – or scenarios – of biogeophysical and socioeconomic conditions. The overall research aim is to develop the conceptual frameworks and methods necessary to formulate a set of scenarios for researching the interactions between regional food systems and GEC. These scenarios will be specifically designed to assist analyses of possible policy and biogeophysical interventions for adaptation to GEC and will frame a set of manageable exploratory futures and contexts in which to undertake GECAFS analyses. They will also assist with developing better links between GECAFS, the GEC science community and regional/national policy-makers.
Global scenarios have already been successfully used to help reveal and address knowledge gaps about the plausible future interactions between GEC and a number of ecosystem goods and services, eg food or water availability or climate regulation. It has been difficult to down-scale global scenarios such as IPCC-SRES because they are relatively coarse in scale for particular regions or specific driving forces important for eg food systems analysis. Furthermore, there are no scenarios specifically designed to investigate the wider issues that underpin food security. Creating regional scenarios is not just a matter of downscaling. Some of the information in global scenarios (eg climate change projections) can be down-scaled for regional use, while other information will be new and will come directly from the region in question. To this end, GECAFS research will bring together regional knowledge and global scenario exercises and draw on cross-scale linking (or nesting) methodologies developed by other research groups. This will deliver a product of direct relevance to the region in question.
The scenarios will encompass the factors affecting all aspects of food security and therefore represent key GEC (not just climate change) and socioeconomic changes. They will both help ensure full representation of these changes in GECAFS analyses and clarify regional development objectives. They will involve key components of the food system (eg availability, access and utilisation); the socioeconomic conditions (eg population, economic performance, technology, institutional arrangements and cultural variables); climate (eg analysis of current and future climate variability, as well as long-term climate trends, which will build on the improved climate descriptions of the last 45 years now being published); and other biogeophysical conditions (eg changes in land and water quality and availability).
Initial research needs to review and build upon relevant aspects of existing global scenarios to develop a small set of global storylines relevant to food systems research. Global scenarios will then be fine tuned and enriched to develop a consistent scenario set suitable for addressing the needs and interests of regional stakeholders. The list of key global drivers in global scenarios needs to be reduced to key drivers relevant to food systems. These are of principal relevance at the regional level, where some drivers are more measurable than at the global level, and where responses to scenarios will be quicker. Management options must be viable within the context of a given scenario, but it will be important to differentiate clearly between the scenario itself and possible management interventions.
Key scenarios research issues relating to food systems are:
- What are the plausible changes in environmental and socioeconomic conditions that will affect food systems?
- What elements of global scenarios are most important for regional-level food system analyses
- How best can global scenarios be linked to regional scale so as to capture regional-level factors relevant to food systems?