Climate change impacts on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from comprehensive climate change scenarios

Claudia Ringler, Tingju Zhu (), Ximing Cai, Jawoo Koo and Dingbao Wang

No 1042, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Climate change impacts vary significantly, depending on the scenario and the Global Circulation Model (GCM) chosen. This is particularly true for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses a comprehensive climate change scenario (CCC) based on ensembles of 17 GCMs selected based on their relative performance regarding past predictions of temperature and precipitation at the level of 2o x 2o grid cells, generated by a recently developed entropy-based downscaling model. Based on past performance, the effects of temperature and precipitation across the 17 GCMs are incorporated into a global hydrological model that is linked with IFPRI's IMPACT water and food projections model to assess the effects of climate change on food outcomes for the region. For Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper finds that the CCC scenario predicts consistently higher temperatures and mixed precipitation changes for the 2050 period. Compared to historic climate scenarios, climate change will lead to changes in yield and area growth, higher food prices and therefore lower affordability of food, reduced calorie availability, and growing childhood malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Keywords: climate change; hydrology; crop yield; food security; China; Africa; Asia; Eastern Asia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/153659

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1042

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().