Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project: Phase I Activities By a Global Community Of Science.

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. Currently, AgMIP has over 500 participants from more than 40 countries contributing their expertise to over 30 projects and activities. The goals of AgMIP are to improve substantially the characterization of world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. Analyses of the agricultural impacts of climate variability and change require a transdisciplinary effort to consistently link state-of-the-art climate scenarios to crop and economic models. Crop model outputs are aggregated as inputs to regional and global economic models to determine regional vulnerabilities, changes in comparative advantage, price effects, and potential adaptation strategies in the agricultural sector. Climate, crop model, economics, and information technology protocols are used to guide coordinated AgMIP research activities around the world, along with cross-cutting themes that address aggregation, uncertainty, and the development of Representative Agricultural Pathways (RAPs) to enable testing of climate change adaptations in the context of other global trends.

Research activities include ongoing crop-specific assessments (e.g., maize, wheat, sugarcane, rice), global gridded crop and economic model intercomparisons, and many other initiatives that allow for the better evaluation of the impacts of climate change on agricultural production and food security around the world. AgMIP is currently focused in two key regions, South Asia (with projects in Pakistan, Southern India, Sri Lanka and the Indo-Gangetic Basin) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Western Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa) and is in the early stages of creating new programs in Latin America and East Asia.