20 November 2023 | 16:00-17.30 UTC, 17:00-18:30 CET
Shocks to food-production systems all over the world have become more prevalent in recent decades. Under further global warming, climate hazards such as concurrent heat and drought make these shocks even more likely, potentially leading to higher production losses and widespread food insecurity. Shocks may also be caused or intensified from geo-political or socio-economic events. Impacts are exacerbated, for example, when several regions or systems are affected, leading to compounding or cascading effects across environmental and human systems.
In this webinar, we will explore potential cascading and compound shocks to global food production systems and their impacts, focusing on state-of-the-art tools and the current challenges and possibilities of going beyond impacts on single sectors or shocks towards large-scale and multisectoral cascading impact assessment.
The discussion will be moderated by Dr Laura Suarez-Gutierrez.
Speakers' presentations:
Dr Corey Lesk: How compound extremes impact crops and what they mean for adaptation
Dr Franziska Gaupp: Systemic risk and compound vulnerability in the food system: a Somalia case study
Dr Peter Alexander: How shocks related to the war in Ukraine impact the global food system
Watch the recording of the webinar here:
Speakers:
Dr Lesk is a postdoctoral researcher in the Climate Modeling & Impacts Group at the Dartmouth College. With a track record in studying the impact of weather on food crops and ways to adapt agriculture to a more extreme climate, Dr Lesk has also assessed the greenhouse gas emissions likely to result from the climate transition.
Dr Gaupp has previously worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. She holds a DPhil (PhD) from the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and a BSc in Economics from the Freie Universität Berlin.
His work centers around social, economic and ecological interactions within the food and land use systems, and considers interactions between climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as how the globalization of the food system creates teleconnections between actions in one location having consequences in others.
A member of the WCRP’s Safe Landing Pathways working group, he was a lead author for the 2022 IPCC (WGII) report assessing the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability to climate change. Currently, he is a coordinating lead author (CLA) on UNEP’s 7th Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-7) for the Food System Transformation Pathways chapter, and a member of Defra’s ELM Climate Change Expert Panel.
He will be speaking on "How shocks related to the war in Ukraine impact the global food system".