Latest Research

This year’s severe drought in Russia and unprecedented floods in Pakistan offer a glimpse of a future negatively affected by climate change. Many of the world’s farmers, especially smallholders in developing countries, will likely be hit the hardest. Together with a growing global population and increased demand for food, climate change will pose significant challenges to sustainable agricultural production and human wellbeing in the coming decades.

A December 2010 report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) uses sophisticated computer modeling to assess various potential effects of climate change on agriculture through the year 2050 and beyond. Based on this analysis, the report makes specific recommendations on how to help small-scale farmers adapt to climate change and avoid major increases in poverty and hunger.

Climate Change Research at IFPRI

IFPRI’s comprehensive approach to climate change analysis looks at the key drivers of climate change and their possible evolution over time. A scenario-based framework is used to forecast how these major drivers of change will impact food and agricultural systems and food security. Based in part on these projections, IFPRI is developing adaptation and mitigation strategies, including ones that show how alternate climate policy regimes will affect agriculture, food security, and poor people. Developing countries could finance climate adaptation and mitigation strategies with offset payments from developed countries, but the impacts of these and other approaches need to be better understood.. Effective adaptation and mitigation could generate income in rural areas, further increasing local capacity to adapt to climate change, but the best means of encouraging these outcomes need to be identified.