Columbia

The Potsdam Post-Doctoral Fellowship Fund aims at strengthen the collaboration between the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Potsdam Institute. The project combines network methods developed at Columbia with macroeconomic approaches developed at PIK to study food security issues on the country level. Thereby, a focus is put on analyzing the impacts of yield variability, storage holding, trade policies, and network topology in order to assess how the resilience of the global food system can be secured under ongoing climate change and future population growth. Further, in a more general setting, the cascading of indirect losses induced by climate extremes in the global supply network are studied with the dynamic agent-based network model acclimate currently developed at PIK. Within the first funding period, economic losses of tropical cyclones are studied for the historical period as well as for different future global warming and socio-economic scenarios. Whereas synthetic tracks of tropical cyclones are generated with a dynamic, stochastic downscaling model developed at Columbia, the indirect economic losses are assessed with PIK's acclimate model.