CaTFoodS

Global food security is under pressure from compounding risks of extreme weather events and uncoordinated unilateral trade policies. The ongoing intensification of extreme weather events under global warming together with population growth and dietary changes puts an additional burden on the global food system. The state-of-art agricultural IAMs may assess longer-term food security risks arising from socioeconomic and climatic conditions, but a comprehensive and scalable dynamic food security assessment tool to i) assess systemic threats from short-term weather-induced supply failures and unilateral policy responses to global food security and ii) examine the effectiveness and limitations of urgent adaptation measures to short-term disruptive events is still missing. Here, I aim to address this research gap by assessing the impacts of heat waves and droughts as well as trade policy responses on global and regional food security. To this end, I will substantially extend the agent-based network model Agrimate [58]. Operating on a bi-weekly resolution, the model simulates the price, consumption, and storage dynamics of a complex network of heterogeneous regional commercial and strategic storage holders, and different groups of consumers to weather and trade-induced supply failures. It thereby allows to assess the impact of potentially amplifying policy responses such as cascading export restrictions. I intend to elaborate regional hotspots of food insecurity and identify particularly vulnerable regional income groups and test the suitability of agent-based approaches for quantitative analyses. Besides these assessments for the present climate and socioeconomic structure, I also plan food security analyses for future projected climate and socioeconomic conditions based on existing results of agricultural IAMs, adding to the urgent need to assess the short-term risk of future food systems.