This report assesses the cost of adaptation to climate change across a range of future climate scenarios and investment options. We focus on offsetting climate change impacts on hunger through investment in agricultural research, water management, and rural infrastructure in developing countries. We link climate, crop, water, and economic models to (1) analyze scenarios of future change in the agriculture sector to 2050 and (2) assess trade-offs for these investments across key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for poverty, hunger, and water. Our reference projections show that climate change slows progress toward eliminating hunger, with an additional 78 million people facing chronic hunger in 2050 relative to a no-climate-change future, over half of them in Africa south of the Sahara. Increased investments can offset these impacts. Achieving this would require that annual investment in international agricultural research increase from US$1.62 billion to US$2.77 billion per year between 2015 and 2050. Additional water and infrastructure investments are estimated to be more expensive than agricultural R&D at about US$12.7 billion and US$10.8 billion per year, respectively, but these address key gaps to support transformation toward food system resiliency. Findings on ranges of costs and trade-offs and complementarities across SDGs will help policymakers make better-informed choices between alternative investment strategies.

This report provides a quantitative assessment of the impacts of alternative investment options on the CGIAR’s SLOs (relating to poverty – SLO1, food and nutrition security – SLO2, and natural resources and ecosystem services – SLO3) in the context of changes in population, income, technology, and climate to 2050 as well as for key SDGs of importance to the developing world. The report serves as a source of information and evidence of the impact of CGIAR efforts in agricultural R&D as well as the role of complementary investments. It is intended to help the CGIAR Centers, CG Research Programs (CRP), system management, and donors to complement other efforts to assess the overall impact and benefits of investing in international and national agricultural research programs.

This report is a component of the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS)–-funded project “Impacts of Climate Extremes on Future Water and Food Security in South Asia and East Africa.” The goal of the project was to characterize extreme drought events, to improve on a methodology to assess the probability of these events in the future under climate change, to illustrate their impacts, and to provide suggestions on coping strategies. The present report sets the stage for the overall project by undertaking a review of the causes of vulnerability to drought in East Africa and the western Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) of South Asia, and discussing the options to increase resilience to drought in the agricultural sector. Agriculture is a high-risk endeavor in both regions, due to a combination of recurrent droughts—which may intensify due to climate change—poor soil fertility, and a host of constraints faced by farmers, especially low access to input and output markets. These factors, combined with farmers’ high aversion to risk, stifle investments in agriculture, resulting in continuous underachieving production, low income, and persisting poverty.

According to the United Nations, the world’s population will grow by 2 billion people over the coming decades to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 (UNDESA-DP 2019a). The dignity and life prospects of those additional 2 billion people will depend on their ability to meet basic needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter, and their access to adequate employment. The most pressing need for jobs will be felt in those regions and countries that have not yet gone through the demographic transition, and where the cohort of young people is growing rapidly. The challenge will be compounded by an increasingly crowded, more competitive world with fewer natural resources per capita, and by the threat of climate change, which is projected to affect every sector of the economy (Arent 2014).

The International Food Policy Research Institute’s IMPACT model is a robust tool for analyzing global and regional challenges in food, agriculture, and natural resources. Continuously updated and refined, IMPACT version 3.6 is the latest update to the model for continuously improving the treatment of complex issues, including climate change, food security, and economic development. IMPACT 3.6 multimarket model integrates climate, crop simulation, and water models into a comprehensive system, providing decision-makers with a flexible platform to assess the potential impacts of various scenarios on biophysical systems, socioeconomic trends, technologies, and policies.

The results of this study reveal that the full inclusion of crop production in the forest landscape restoration approach could produce largescale, worldwide benefits for food security and therefore facilitate a wide uptake of restoration practices and the implementation of large restoration projects. The positive impacts are multifaceted and significant in size: a reduction in malnourished children ranging from three to six million; a reduced number of people at risk of hunger, estimated to be between 70 and 151 million; reduced pressure for expansion of cropland; increased soil fertility; and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, while also increasing yields and productivity. The benefits from restoration practices on crop production strongly suggest that a forest landscape restoration approach that meaningfully integrates agriculture can facilitate the implementation of restoration plans on large amounts of land.

As the effects of climate change set in, and population and income growth exert increasing pressure on natural resources, food security is becoming a pressing challenge for countries worldwide. Awareness of these threats is critical to transforming concern into long-term planning, and modeling tools like the one used in the present study are beneficial for strategic support of decision making in the agricultural policy arena. The focus of this investigation is the Republic of Korea, where economic growth has resulted in large shifts in diet in recent decades, in parallel with a decline in both arable land and agricultural production, and a tripling of agricultural imports, compared to the early 2000s. Although these are recognized as traits of a rapidly growing economy, officials and experts in the country recognize that the trends expose the Republic of Korea to climate change shocks and fluctuations in the global food market. This study uses the IMPACT (International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade) economic model to investigate possible future trends of both domestic food production and dependence on food imports, as well as the effects from adoption of agricultural practices consistent with a climate change adaptation strategy. The goal is to help assess the prospects for sustaining improvements in food security and possibly inform the national debate on agricultural policy. Results show that historical trends of harvested area and imports may continue into the future under climate change. Although crop models suggest negative long-term impacts of climate change on rice yield in the Republic of Korea, the economic model simulations show that intrinsic productivity growth and market effects have the potential to limit the magnitude of losses; rice production and yield are projected to keep growing between 2010 and 2050, with a larger boost when adoption of improved technologies is taken into consideration. At the same time, food production and net exports from the country’s major trading partners are also projected to increase, although diminished by climate change effects. In sum, these results show that kilocalorie availability will keep growing in the Republic of Korea, and although climate change may have some impact by reducing the overall availability, the effect does not appear strong enough to have significant consequences on projected trends of increasing food security.

The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Climate change, population, and income growth will drive food demand in the coming decades. Baseline scenarios show food prices for maize, rice, and wheat would significantly increase between 2005 and 2050, and the number of people at risk of hunger in the developing world would grow from 881 million in 2005 to more than a billion people by 2050. Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies examines which current and potential strategies offer solutions to fight hunger. The type and effectiveness of agricultural technologies are highly debated, and the debates are often polarized. Technology options are many, but transparent evidence-based information has been inconclusive or scarce. This book endeavors to respond to the challenge of growing food sustainably without degrading our natural resource base. The authors use a groundbreaking modeling approach that combines comprehensive process-based modeling of agricultural technologies with sophisticated global food demand, supply, and trade modeling. This approach assesses the yield and food impact through 2050 of a broad range of agricultural technologies under varying assumptions of climate change for the three key staple crops: maize, rice, and wheat. Geared toward policymakers in ministries of agriculture and national agricultural research institutes, as well as multilateral development banks and the private sector, Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity provides guidance on various technology strategies and which to pursue as competition grows for land, water, and energy across productive sectors and even increasingly across borders. The book is an important tool for targeting investment decisions today and going forward.

This 2013 Global Food Policy Report is the third in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food and nutrition security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in achieving food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.