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Erick Boy

Erick Boy

Erick Boy is the Chief Nutritionist in the HarvestPlus section of the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit. As head of nutrition for the HarvestPlus Program since 2008, he has led research that has generated scientific evidence on biofortified staple crops as efficacious and effective interventions to help address iron, vitamin A, and zinc deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

Granular socioeconomic data are increasingly becoming available in agricultural research

Open Access | CC-BY-4.0

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HarvestChoice researchers summarize new data paradigm in the journal Nature Climate Change.

In a Nature Climate Change commentary published last year, Otto et al. highlight a scalar divide in data between natural and social sciences and point out the need for subnational socioeconomic datasets, calling for a “new paradigm in data gathering”.

But, as HarvestChoice researchers point out in a newly published letter to the editor, access to detailed socioeconomic data has been improving steadily over the past 15 years:

“Spatially explicit, harmonized socio-economic data products are increasingly available to the public, such as population and poverty grids, microdata derived from national household surveys, and rasterized sociodemographic indicators. While these products are often overlooked in the economic literature, they are well suited to the study of climate’s impact on human geography across scales.”

Subnational datasets allow researchers to analyze complex relationships between the environment and populations, for example, across relevant geographical domains (e.g., watersheds, farming systems and climatic zones). To make a point, by correlating bottom-up data pooled from Demographic and Health (DHS) Surveys with HarvestChoice’s agroecological zones, the authors present a quick spatial analysis showing early childhood wasting is significantly more prevalent in the arid and semi-arid zones of Africa south of the Sahara, confirmed by the first-order stochastic dominance analysis.

The authors note these types of granular datasets, especially those harmonized on high-resolution global grids, have already been used and will be increasingly used in economic and biophysical modeling analyses. More work surely needs to be done to address the world’s key challenges of food insecurity and climate change. But in terms of the data revolution, “the paradigm shift is alive and kicking already.”


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