MACSUR TradeM Workshop Exploring new ideas for trade and agriculture model integration for assessing the impacts of climate change on food security

Abstract

The first TradeM workshop was held at Haifa University (Israel), 3-5 March 2013. It was a  state-of-the-art Workshop ‘Economic Modelling on Agriculture with Climate Change for  Food Security’. Sixteen papers are presented, following a call for abstracts submitted in  December 2012.  Presented, reviewed and discussed models, their inputs, outputs and main results of  case-study analyses let indicate of how the model can be used to analyze the  impacts of climate change on food security, how the model can contribute to, and  benefit from other economic and/or crop and livestock models and what input is  needed from CropM and LiveM . There were explored ideas for closer integration and  linkage between agriculture and economic models and between economic models at  different levels, addressing issues of model structure, scale and data processing. Focus was  on model comparison, gap analysis, scientific advancements and improvements. We also  addressed the key challenges of the economic models (macro- versus micro-economics;  uncertainty versus risks; variability and distribution), and identified ways to cope with  scaling, uncertainty, risks. The workshop let identify the requirements from CropM and  LiveM, find policy questions that MACSUR is going to address, start with the content of the  case studies and plan for publication of scientific papers.  The sessions were broadcast live via the internet. Twenty-four registered participants and  about 65 local visitors attended the workshop.

This work was co-financed by NCBiR, Contract no. FACCE JPI/04/2012 - P100 PARTNER