29 July 2014: In response to a call by the US administration’s Climate Data Initiative, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Research Foundation’s Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS) announced a public-private partnership initiative focused on analyzing how food systems can help achieve sustainable nutrition security.
The partnership between CIMSANS, the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) and others will help consolidate resources and expertise to strengthen the scientific base on building resilience to and mitigating the impacts of climate change so that human nutrition needs can be met in a more sustainable manner.
CIMSANS highlights that sustainability considerations have largely been absent from food security assessments, which instead have focused on caloric availability, rather than on dietary diversity, overconsumption and micronutrient deficiencies (or “hidden hunger”). The project will thus assess food systems, including staple and non-staple foods, through 2015, based on seven sustainability metrics: caloric and nutrient adequacy; dietary quality; dietary diversity; dietary sustainability; consumer choice; food system resilience; and food system sustainability. This assessment methodology can then be deployed to evaluate the impact of potential food system interventions intended to improve sustainability and human nutrition, and will empower those working in sectors impacted by climate change by providing them with tools to make better-informed decisions, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a key partner to CIMSANS and AgMIP.
More specifically, the initiative will also aim to enable partners to: collect relevant private- and public-sector data and make them available as open data; harmonize input and output data formats across multiple modeling systems; improve crop and economic models through open source code modeling approaches; and apply these data and modeling systems to conduct a robust assessment of sustainable nutrition security.
IFPRI, a member of the CGIAR consortium, aims to provide research-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. The US administration’s Climate Data brings together open government data with partnering institutions to develop data-driven planning and tools to help build resilience in the agriculture sector. [IFPRI News Story] [CIMSANS News Release][Publication: Assessing Sustainable Nutrition Security: The Role of Food Systems]