Modelling alternative futures of global food security: Insights from FOODSECURE

Article

Global economic models have been increasingly used to project food and agricultural developments for long term-time horizons, but food security aspects have often been limited to food availability projections. In this paper, we propose a broader framework to explore the future of food and nutrition security with a focus on food availability, food access, and a reasonable proxy for food utilisation.

This framework is applied to a new set of stakeholder-designed scenarios of alternative future worlds that were developed for the FOODSECURE project and are structured around the two dimensions of inequality and sustainability. The framework is tested with two global models, MAGNET-IMAGE and GLOBIOM, and illustrated through an assessment of the possible trade-offs between food and nutrition security and sustainability in each of the worlds.

Our results indicate that more equal worlds improve food security over a wider range of food security indicators and neglecting the sustainability dimension might revert food security gains over time. This paper concludes that there is a need for model-based scenario analysis to assess the complex and multi-dimensional characteristics of global food security.

Authors

PBL Authors
Elke Stehfest Willem-Jan van Zeist
Other authors
Hans van Meijl
Lindsay Shutes
Hugo Valin
Michiel van Dijk
Marijke Kuiper
Andrzej Tabeaua
Tomoko Hasegawa
Petr Havlik

Specifications

Publication title
Modelling alternative futures of global food security: Insights from FOODSECURE
Publication date
17 March 2020
Publication type
Article
Publication language
English
Magazine
Global Food Security
Issue
Volume 25, June 2020, 100358
Product number
4198