FOCUS

Sustainable food production is a central element of a future bioeconomy. However, many food production systems on land and in the oceans are under pressure from intensive human use and global environmental changes. FOCUS contributes an important element for tackling this challenge by quantifying how climate change will affect food production, food security and rural livelihoods around the world. The focus is on coastal areas, where the largest part of population growth and economic growth is expected, and on the effect of climate change on agriculture and ecosystem services. Thus, FOCUS aims to globally assess the economic effects of climate change on marine ecosystem services (fisheries, and aquaculture), and agriculture in coastal areas around the world. FOCUS will study in detail the distributive and welfare effects of a changing climate in terms of food security and rural coastal livelihoods. Fish stocks are strongly affected by changing water temperatures, and climate change will shift fish stocks, catches, and economic benefits from the fisheries. Coastal agriculture will in addition face risks of sea-level rise, increased flooding and salting. FOCUS will couple a global agricultural sector and land-use model in combination with a new global bio-economic fisheries model to quantify these effects for the coastal areas around the world. A particular challenge that FOCUS addresses are the market “teleconnections” of the coastal rural economies, i.e. the interconnectedness of different world regions due to global food markets. In collaboration with practitioners from FAO, IPCC, and environmental NGOs, FOCUS will develop policy approaches for integrating a well-managed, linked land-ocean system into the bioeconomy, including governance levels from local to global.

PIK uses results from an ensemble of global gridded crop models and general circulation models (from the AgMIP and ISIMIP) to assess climate impacts on productivity of major food crops as well as grassland with global coverage. Regionally specific estimates of global change (social-ecological-economic) are used in the global agricultural sector and land-use model MAgPIE to identify, where coastal agriculture, especially in least developed countries, may be negatively affected by inundation and salinization.