Changing the climate change conversation

2022 World Food Prize laureate calls for same urgency on climate change as on COVID vaccine development

By Michael Crumb

Cynthia Rosenzweig, this year’s World Food Prize winner, says the same collaboration that was created to develop vaccines to fight the coronavirus pandemic is needed to fight climate change.

Rosenzweig, a senior researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School, was named this year’s World Food Prize laureate in May. She will officially accept this year’s World Food Prize and its $250,000 award during next week’s Borlaug Dialogue, a weeklong conference that brings together government leaders, agriculture industry experts and scientists from around the world to address global poverty and hunger.

Rosenzweig will accept the award during a ceremony scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 20, at the state Capitol.

Earlier in the week, Rosenzweig will give the Laureate Lecture from 8 to 9 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 17, in the Great Hall at the Iowa State University Memorial Union in Ames.

An agronomist and climatologist, Rosenzweig is credited for her pioneering work in modeling the impact that climate change has on global food production. As the founder of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), Rosenzweig has led research that has advanced methods of predicting the performance of food production as it adapts to a changing climate.

Work done by AgMIP has provided science-based data used by decision-makers in more than 90 countries that are working to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The Business Record had the opportunity to speak with Rosenzweig ahead of next week’s Borlaug Dialogue to learn more about her work, what she views as the biggest accomplishments in the fight against hunger, and what she sees as the biggest challenges that lie ahead. Responses have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

What motivated you to pursue the study of how climate affects world food systems?

When I was a graduate student at Rutgers in the early 1980s the Goddard Institute for Space Studies asked for a graduate student to come and work there on remote sensing of agricultural scenes. They were just making the first projections of how increasing greenhouse gasses would affect the climate. The then director of the institute and lead researcher was from Iowa, and he asked a question that filtered down to me because I was a graduate student in agronomy. He asked the question, what do these projections of climate change mean for food? So that was the motivating question for my whole career and I started working on that question and I am still working on answering it today.

What do you think has been the biggest breakthrough to date in trying to answer that question?

I have to say AgMIP. This is the global network of food and climate risk researchers that I and others founded in 2010. The members use models in multimodel assessments, and by creating protocols for multimodel assessments we improved the rigor of projections of climate change and food. That’s what the contribution of AgMIP is.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing the fight against hunger and food insecurity? 

This is what I’m going to talk about at the [Memorial] Union on Monday night. It’s what I call the moonshot for improving the science and the models, and that will entail improving their responses to extreme climate events. We need the moonshot to work with geneticists to improve the models, we need to work with entomologists to improve the pests, and we need centers of excellence around the world to work together to improve the projections of climate change and food and to develop the solutions. That’s the breakthrough that we need.

What needs to happen to make that happen?

We need to think that during the COVID pandemic, the labs all around the world that were developing the vaccines, they cooperated more than they had ever done before, so we need the creation of these centers of excellence without silos with an overarching change in culture to encourage and embed cooperation among all the researchers to solve climate change and food.

What does receiving the World Food Prize mean for you and your work?

It’s honoring me, but it’s also emphasizing and bringing forward how the challenge of climate change is now becoming front and center in food, and there are two parts to that. The attention it is bringing is that the food system is responsible for about one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. We can’t solve all of climate change without addressing food system emissions. And if we are able to constrain climate change, we still have to help farmers around the world, not just in developing countries with smallholder farmers who are most vulnerable, but also in big producing countries like the United States, and the prize is really  bringing to the fore the importance of climate change this year.

Do we as a country or global family need to refocus the conversation on food insecurity to place more emphasis on those root causes, including climate change, that lead to food insecurity and hunger?

Yes, definitely. There is a movement towards transforming the food system into a health delivery system instead of a calorie delivery system, and this has very much to do with malnutrition, which has two different aspects. One is food insecurity when there are millions of people in the world who are hungry. But at the same time there are many people [who are food insecure] from lack of nutritious food and lack of healthy diets, which is a scourge in developing countries. As developing countries move to become middle-income countries, then with their change of diets they tend to eat more carbohydrates and more processed foods and give up the legumes and some of the elements of healthy diets. So linking the nutrition on both sides, on hunger and malnutrition, to healthy diets is where we need to go forward in the transformation of the world food systems, but remembering it is all happening under changing climate conditions. One thing that is happening is bringing the nutrition community together with the climate change community and the ag community. We need to talk with each other and work together to transform the world food system.

How do you take the work you do and make it relatable to those working at the local level to combat food insecurity in their communities?

Agriculture and food has this global aspect, but what we do at AgMIP is we do regional integrated assessments on a regional scale. So that’s with the farmer part and different farming systems. On the ag production side we don’t only work on the global scales, but we work at farming regions as well, and when we’re there we work with decision-makers and the different groups, the local groups such as the food banks, and we ask them what do you want to know and how can we help? How can we use our models and our tools from our tool box at AgMIP to help them? A lot of what food banks are doing is reducing food loss and waste, which then also contributes to responding to climate change.

If someone wants to learn more about your research or efforts to combat hunger worldwide, what source would you recommend?

For online I would go to AgMIP.org. For a book, we’ve created a series of books called the “Handbook of Climate Change and Agroecosystems.” Some of them talk about work around the world, some about our own countries, just everything about climate change, and that’s published by World Scientific.

Do you have a book you’ve read for fun that you would recommend?

It’s not just one. It’s a series of books that was popular in the 1970s or ’80s by Patrick O’Brien about a British naval captain and his scientist friend who is also a naturalist, and they sail all around the world. They encounter many, many challenges. For example, they have shipwrecks and they have to rebuild their ship, and their spirit and their perseverance of solving challenges is absolutely amazing. They have to depend on themselves for everything. And I want to link that to the climate change challenge, and all of us on planet Earth in a way sailing all together and what we have to do is really work together to solve the challenge of climate change. This wonderful series of books is inspiring because of the spirit by which they step up to challenges.