The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP): Integrated Regional Assessment Projects

The worldwide agricultural sector faces the significant challenge of increasing productionto provide food security for a population projected to rise to nine billion bymid-century, while protecting the environment and the sustainable functioning ofecosystems. This challenge is compounded by the need to adapt to climate changeby taking advantage of potential benefits, and by minimizing the potentially negativeimpacts, to agricultural production. The goals of Agricultural Model Intercomparisonand Improvement Project (AgMIP) are to improve substantially the characterizationof world food security under climate change and to enhance adaptationcapacity in both developing and developed countries (www.agmip.org).To accomplish these goals, AgMIP organizes protocol-based intercomparisonsof crop and economic models and ensemble projections to produce enhanced climatechange assessments by the crop and economic modeling communities. Theseassessments focus on research related to climate change agricultural impacts andadaptation (Rosenzweig et al., 2012). This chapter describes the AgMIP regionalintegrated assessment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia