Modelling future food security

How did you contribute to the IPCC Report

Three or four years ago I got an email from somebody in one of the International Panel on Climate Change Working Groups. They were looking for a food systems expert to assist with a chapter in a future report. That’s slightly unusual. These groups provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on climate change, its implications and potential future risks.

The normal process is that working group members apply to a government representative and ask to be nominated. If the representative likes the look of your nomination documents, then they forward this on to the IPCC and you go through a selection process. In this case, one chapter team needed a food systems expert – they had been trying to cover food systems themselves and they just felt they weren’t able to do so correctly. I ended up as the lead author.

Why is climate modelling important?

“Modelling is a way of quantifying something that we already knew, but that we didn’t know the magnitude of, as well as positing potential scenarios we may not have fully expected.”

When it comes to climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, there are complex interactions between many different sort of drivers and outcomes and the only real way to get kind of better understanding of how those feedback and interactions work is through modelling.

Modelling is not trying to be predictive. It’s not meant to say exactly what the world will look like in X number of years. Modelling is a way of quantifying something that we already knew, but that we didn’t know the magnitude of, as well as positing potential scenarios we may not have fully expected. The complexity of the various factors that play into, for example, agricultural production, are so wide that they can be incredibly hard to grasp.

Modelling allows us to highlight potential impacts, the relative scale of the impact and how they might play out – and this gives us a clear and concise way to communicate.

What’s your day job?

“There is always competition for land. Within the search for climate solutions, food security is never the only concern.”

Well right now, I develop land use models for food systems. I work with researchers in Scotland and Germany to improve our existing models in ways that can look at food systems on a global scale.

Building these models is sort of like having a thread that you keep pulling.

You start by looking at land use, and where we grow what. But when you’re talking about land use, you’re obviously thinking about climate change and biodiversity and water use as well, so you add that into the model. Then, you add in human health: information about nutrition, obesity, and malnourishment. We are working to add in human decision making too: the choices we make about what we eat and the choices that farmers make about what to grow where. We are also trying to add in political and economic factors, like the impact of international trade. There is always competition for land. Within the search for climate solutions, food security is never the only concern.

What should we do?

People often ask me, what should our focus be? What is the one action that we should be focusing on right now.

I’m not sure I want to be drawn on what’s the single most important action right now. It depends. Are we talking about actions to mitigate or reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the pace of climate change, which is obviously valid and important? Or are we talking about actions to adapt to the current level or increasing levels of climate change in ways that make us more resilient or able to cope with those changes? Both are incredibly important.

Research students often have a moment of realisation, when they discover that everything has been done before. Yes, everything has been done before. But, in a sense, nothing’s ever been done fully. We work in nets of knowledge that always have holes in. Research is about placing yourself in a hole. A university gives you the space to explore all avenues and questions, which can then create real world solutions and collaborations both internally and externally.

How did you become an academic?

I haven’t always been an academic. I was a mechanical engineer as an undergraduate and then I worked in investment banking for a decade or so, writing computational models, which I still do. For six years I ran a livestock farm in Aberdeenshire, here in Scotland. Then I came back to university – to the University of Edinburgh – to do a PhD in agricultural economics. I didn’t leave – I just sort of loitered around academia ever since.

How do you decompress?

In the winter, if I had time, I might like to be up the snowy mountains. In the summer I’d like to be sailing on the West coast of Scotland.