Abstract: In order to maintain food security and sustainability of production under climate change, interdisciplinary and international collaboration in research is essential. In the EU, knowledge hubs are important funding instruments for the development of an interconnected European Research Area. Here, network analysis was used to assess whether the pilot knowledge hub MACSUR has affected interdisciplinary collaboration, using co-authorship of peer reviewed articles as a measure of collaboration. The broad community of all authors identified as active in the field of agriculture and climate change was increasingly well connected over the period studied. Between knowledge hub members, changes in network parameters suggest an increase in collaborative interaction beyond that expected due to network growth, and greater than that found in the broader community. Given that interdisciplinary networks often take several years to have an impact on research outputs, these changes within the relatively new MACSUR community provide evidence that the knowledge hub structure has been effective in stimulating collaboration. However, analysis showed that knowledge hub partners were initially well-connected, suggesting that the initiative may have gathered together researchers with particular resources or inclinations towards collaborative working. Long term, consistent funding and ongoing reflection to improve networking structures may be necessary to sustain the early positive signs from MACSUR, to extend its success to a wider community of researchers, or to repeat it in less connected fields of science. Tackling complex challenges such as climate change will require research structures that can effectively support and utilise the diversity of talents beyond the already well-connected core of scientists at major research institutes. But network research shows that this core, well-connected group are vital brokers in achieving wider integration.

Abstract: Highlights • Governance impacts on land use dynamics are modeled at the global scale with an agro-economic dynamic optimization model. • Improved governance performance lowers deforestation, reduces cropland expansion and increases agricultural yield. • Good governance makes a decisive difference in investment for increasing yields in developing regions. • Weak governance increases food prices, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. • Improving governance performance has significant impacts on poverty reduction. Abstract Deforestation, mainly caused by unsustainable agricultural expansion, results in a loss of biodiversity and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, as well as impinges on local livelihoods. Countries’ governance performance, particularly with respect to property rights security, exerts significant impacts on land-use patterns by affecting agricultural yield-related technological investment and cropland expansion. This study aims to incorporate governance factors into a recursive agro-economic dynamic model to simulate governance impacts on land-use patterns at the global scale. Due to the difficulties of including governance indicators directly into numerical models, we use lending interest rates as discount rates to reflect risk-accounting factors associated with different governance scenarios. In addition to a reference scenario, three scenarios with high, low and mixed divergent discount rates are formed to represent weak, strong and fragmented governance. We find that weak governance leads to slower yield growth, increased cropland expansion and associated deforestation, mainly in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. This is associated with increasing food prices, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. By contrast, strong governance performance provides a stable political and economic situation which may bring down deforestation rates, stimulate investment in agricultural technologies, and induce fairly strong decreases in food prices.

Abstract: Using the detailed field experiment data from 1981 to 2009 at four representative agro-meteorological experiment stations in China, along with the Agricultural Production System Simulator (APSIM) rice-wheat model, we evaluated the impact of sowing/transplanting date on phenology and yield of rice-wheat rotation system (RWRS). We also disentangled the contributions of climate change, modern cultivars, sowing/transplanting density and fertilization management, as well as changes in each climate variables, to yield change in RWRS, in the past three decades. We found that change in sowing/transplanting date did not significantly affect rice and wheat yield in RWRS, although alleviated the negative impact of climate change to some extent. From 1981 to 2009, climate change jointly caused rice and wheat yield change by -17.4 to 1.5 %, of which increase in temperature reduced yield by 0.0-5.8 % and decrease in solar radiation reduced it by 1.5-8.7 %. Cultivars renewal, modern sowing/transplanting density and fertilization management contributed to yield change by 14.4-27.2, -4.7- -0.1 and 2.3-22.2 %, respectively. Our findings highlight that modern cultivars and agronomic management compensated the negative impacts of climate change and played key roles in yield increase in the past three decades.