The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a distributed research activity for historical and future climate conditions with participation of multiple crop and economic modeling groups around the world. The goals of AgMIP are to improve substantially the simulation tools that are used to characterize world food security due to climate change, to assess future world food security utilizing the improved models, and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. By providing a coordinated set of model protocols, AgMIP enables linked multi-model climate change assessments for agriculture at both regional and global scales in order to place regional changes in agricultural production in a global context that reflects new trading opportunities, imbalances, and shortages in world markets resulting from climate change and other driving forces of agricultural supply and demand. The three-year project provides the necessary integrated, transdisciplinary framework to assess climate impacts on the agricultural sector and builds capacity for continuing agricultural assessment and management in developing countries under changing climate conditions.