Abstract: Climate change and socioeconomic developments will have a decisive impact on people exposed to hunger. This study analyses climate change impacts on agriculture and potential implications for the occurrence of hunger under different socioeconomic scenarios for 2030, focusing on the world regions most affected by poverty today: the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We use a spatially explicit, agroeconomic land-use model to assess agricultural vulnerability to climate change. The aims of our study are to provide spatially explicit projections of climate change impacts on Costs of Food, and to combine them with spatially explicit hunger projections for the year 2030, both under a poverty, as well as a prosperity scenario. Our model results indicate that while average yields decrease with climate change in all focus regions, the impact on the Costs of Food is very diverse. Costs of Food increase most in the Middle East and North Africa, where available agricultural land is already fully utilized and options to import food are limited. The increase is least in Sub-Saharan Africa, since production there can be shifted to areas which are only marginally affected by climate change and imports from other regions increase. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa can partly adapt to climate change, in our model, by modifying trade and expanding agricultural land. In the Middle East and North Africa, almost the entire population is affected by increasing Costs of Food, but the share of people vulnerable to hunger is relatively low, due to relatively strong economic development in these projections. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Vulnerability to Hunger will persist, but increases in Costs of Food are moderate. While in South Asia a high share of the population suffers from increases in Costs of Food and is exposed to hunger, only a negligible number of people will be exposed at extreme levels. Independent of the region, the impacts of climate change are less severe in a richer and more globalized world. Adverse climate impacts on the Costs of Food could be moderated by promoting technological progress in agriculture. Improving market access would be advantageous for farmers, providing the opportunity to profitably increase production in the Middle East and North Africa as well as in South Asia, but may lead to increasing Costs of Food for consumers. In the long-term perspective until 2080, the consequences of climate change will become even more severe: while in 2030 56% of the global population may face increasing Costs of Food in a poor and fragmented world, in 2080 the proportion will rise to 73%.

Abstract: Long-term food demand scenarios are an important tool for studying global food security and for analysing the environmental impacts of agriculture. We provide a simple and transparent method to create scenarios for future plant-based and animal-based calorie demand, using time-dependent regression models between calorie demand and income. The scenarios can be customized to a specific storyline by using different input data for gross domestic product (GDP) and population projections and by assuming different functional forms of the regressions. Our results confirm that total calorie demand increases with income, but we also found a non-income related positive time-trend. The share of animal-based calories is estimated to rise strongly with income for low-income groups. For high income groups, two ambiguous relations between income and the share of animal-based products are consistent with historical data: First, a positive relation with a strong negative time-trend and second a negative relation with a slight negative time-trend. The fits of our regressions are highly significant and our results compare well to other food demand estimates. The method is exemplarily used to construct four food demand scenarios until the year 2100 based on the storylines of the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). We find in all scenarios a strong increase of global food demand until 2050 with an increasing share of animal-based products, especially in developing countries.

Abstract: Technological change in agriculture plays a decisive role for meeting future demands for agricultural goods. However, up to now, agricultural sector models and models on land use change have used technological change as an exogenous input due to various information and data deficiencies. This paper provides a first attempt towards an endogenous implementation based on a measure of agricultural land use intensity. We relate this measure to empirical data on investments in technological change. Our estimated yield elasticity with respect to research investments is 029 and production costs per area increase linearly with an increasing yield level. Implemented in the global land use model MAgPIE (”Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment”) this approach provides estimates of future yield growth. Highest future yield increases are required in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Our validation with FAO data for the period 1995-2005 indicates that the model behavior is in line with observations. By comparing two scenarios on forest conservation we show that protecting sensitive forest areas in the future is possible but requires substantial investments into technological change. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.