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.

Latest Research

Food Security, Farming, and Climate Change to 2050
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.

Latest Blog

Collective Change, Collective Action & Women’s Assets
A new blog that provides information about the project Enhancing Women’s Assets to Manage Risk under Climate Change: Potential for Group-Based Approaches. The blog and the project look at ways in which programs that protect or strengthen women’s control over critical assets and/or increase returns to assets help poor women farmers and pastoralists manage risk and adapt to climate change—therefore contributing to poverty reduction. The project focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (especially Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mali).

Latest Knowledge Product

CASE Maps: Food Security Climate, Agriculture, and Socio-Economic Maps
An interactive visualization tool developed in partnership with StatPlanet that provides detailed, map-based information about a diversity of indicators, including subnational crop area and yields, national average calorie availability, and international trade flows.