Modelling European Agriculture with Climate Change for Food Security

MACSUR is a knowledge hub within FACCE-JPI (Joint Programming Initiative for  Agriculture, Climate Change, and Food Security). The FACCE-JPI Scientific Research Agenda defines five core research themes to address the impacts of climate change on European agriculture.

MACSUR gathers the excellence of existing research in livestock, crop, and trade science
to describe how climate variability and change will affect regional farming systems and food
production in Europe in the near and the far future and the associated risks and opportunities for European food security. A knowledge hub is an innovative, tailor-made instrument developed by FACCE-JPI, associating 3 complementary dimensions: networking, research and capacity building.

The knowledge hub consists of 73 partners from 17 countries all over Europe and Israel
including Aberystwyth University and Aarhus University. The overarching challenge is to
develop a pan-European capability in the development, use and interpretation of models
to perform risk assessments of the impacts of climate change on European agriculture.
The project focusses on the technical and informational integration of suitable existing
models and their application in regional case studies that reflect the European diversity in
soil, climate, socio-economy and agricultural systems.

To address this the following challenges must be met:

1. Identify and address a range of issues between models in different themes to enable
their closer integration including issues of scale and data processing.

2. Train a new generation of scientists to work across models which contribute to greater
integration of models. This challenge can be described as focusing on the creation of
integrated modellers as opposed to integrated models.

3. Determine the contribution that can be made to reducing uncertainty over the impacts
of climate change on European food security by adopting integrated models of crop
production, animal production and trade.

MACSUR plans close co-operation with other international research networks like AgMIP
and the involvement of political stakeholders. Expected outcomes of the project is a procedure for integrating models, assessment of food security in European case studies, and an assessment of how uncertainty in food security could be reduced further.

Read more here.