In September Frances Cossar of the RUGS team participated in a summer school on food security modelling in Leipzig, Germany. Organised by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the event focused on modelling approaches to investigate different aspects of food security and bridge different spatial scales.
As part of the summer school, Frances presented the integration of a new demand component in our global land use model, which makes diets responsive to changes in prices. When demand reacts to prices that are linked to land use, the projected environmental impact is reduced. This model improvement better reflects the adjustment that individuals make to their diets in response to rising food prices. As demand for animal products increases due to population and income rising, the competition over land will increase, eventually pushing up prices for animal products due to rising costs of production. We would then expect individuals to demand less animal products due to rising prices. Our improved model better captures this dynamic.
This underlines the global challenge of food security, given competing requirements for land resources, nutritional vulnerability of considerable parts of the world’s population and environmental objectives. Scientific modelling of global interactions can help finding innovative solutions to manage these conflicts.
