CCAFS | Scenarios for the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Program
The CCAFS scenarios program has developed socio-economic and climate scenarios as a tool for strategic planning with decision-makers in East and West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, the Andes and Central America, which have been quantified through two models: GLOBIOM (developed by the International Institute for Applies Systems Analysis) and IMPACT (developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute) and linked to the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). CCAFS facilitated the use of these scenarios to test and develop policies and investment plans in these regions, to help create plans that are robust and provide “no-regrets” options in the face of diverse and changing futures. Eighty-one national and regional impact pathways for the use of the CCAFS scenarios have been proposed by decision-makers worldwide. The first set of these pathways has been completed and/or is currently in process, leading to policy outcomes. For instance, with support from the CCAFS scenario team, the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries finalized a Climate Change Action Plan, signed off in 2014, that featured scenario-guided climate smart agriculture investments, as well as capacity building on scenario-guided planning among the government’s staff. Scenarios were also used to develop and test content on development, climate adaptation and food security for the Bangladesh Planning Commission’s next 5 Year Plan for the country. In Vietnam, investment proposals facilitated by FAO have been developed and tested against down-scaled scenarios with decision-makers. In Ghana, a process focusing on bridging gaps between policy levels, using multi-level scenarios, has been conducted with a national policy platform, the results of which are currently being implemented. Similar scenario-guided policy development processes are underway in Honduras, Peru and Uganda. The CCAFS scenarios program is supposed by a number of global partnerships, notably UNEP, WCMC, FAO and Oxfam GB.
Scenarios are developed for each of the six global regions with regional stakeholders, based on key drivers of change for each region. Then, the participants in each regional scenarios process are asked to outline directions of change for key drivers for the IMPACT (IFPRI) and GLOBIOM (IIASA) models, including GDP, population, technology effects on yields and farm inputs. These stakeholders’ assessments are then compared to the SSP drivers for a given region. Thogether, the SSPs are used as a scope within which the regional scenario drivers are outlined. Each regional scenario is comparable to an SSP. SSP2 is used to provide a global context to the different regional scenarios. The scenarios are also combined with the effects of RCP 8.5 on yields, simulated by a range of GCMs.
Project Contact: joost.vervoort@eci.ox.ac.uk