Platform for innovation and collaboration strengthened at AgMIP7
Dr K Dakshina Murthy, ICRISAT; Dr Marc Corbeels, CIRAD-CIMMYT; Dr Peter Q Craufurd, CIMMYT; Dr Sabine Homann-Kee Tui, ICRISAT; Dr Anthony Whitbread, ICRISAT; Dr Gideon Kruseman, CIMMYT; Dr Keith Wiebe, IFPRI; and Dr Mark Rosegrant, IFPRI.
AgMIP, a unique community of practice for innovation, provided a pathway on addressing major global and national challenges at its 7th Global Workshop recently. Scientists from the CGIAR institutions who came together to discuss agricultural systems and outcomes, at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) here, looked at this as an opportunity for collaboration across the developing world.
AgMIP (Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project) brings together diverse teams and creates platforms for innovation, new science and collaboration across the developed and developing world. Since 2010, the AgMIP has been evaluating and developing simulation models of agricultural systems. CGIAR is actively involved in this important community. The highlights of stakeholder engagement presented by Dr Sabine Homann Kee-Tui, ICRISAT, indicated that a range of scales was important for policies to support agricultural adaptation.
Possible farming system changes to cope with higher temperatures and variable rainfall predicted by the climate models, were shared by Dr. Dakshina Murthy, Senior Scientist-Systems Modeling, ICRISAT, based on cropping systems modeler experience from Central India through a DFID-funded project.
Dr Anthony Whitbread, Research Program Director – Innovation Systems for the Drylands, ICRISAT, who recently joined the AgMIP Executive Committee, emphasized on how the CGIAR should become even more active in this community. “To advance our mandates, collaboration with many world-class research institutes in AgMIP can facilitate access to first-class climate science and climate change assessments to combine crop, livestock, economic and climate modelling and enable integrated assessment of climate change impacts. Already, the DFID-funded program with regional teams from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia has developed significant expertise in assessments for their regions to engage stakeholders and policy makers for the process of adaptation,” he said.
Crunching Big Data through the CGIAR Platform was Dr Gideon Kruseman, CIMMYT, while Dr Peter Craufurd, also from CIMMYT, discussed the practicalities of communicating climate information to stakeholders and the importance of institutions working together with their respective strengths and advantages.
AgMIP utilizes diverse crop, livestock, and economic models with state-of-the-science climate scenarios to conduct global and regional assessments of climate and other stresses. It also has advanced methods to integrate stakeholder-informed scenarios into global and regional assessments of current and future agriculture and food systems outlooks. This work motivates research for agriculture, land use, nutrition, shocks and other topics, with participation of over 1,000 agricultural modelers and stakeholders worldwide. AgMIP7 was yet another step forward towards innovation to facilitate a positive change for the developing world.
Funder: Department for International Development, UK
