Food System Scenarios: Exploring Global / Local Linkages

While we develop our ideas in the context of food security and global climate change, the needs are similar in other sectors.

Four challenges must be met to make substantial progress in framing and using scenarios:

1. The global scenarios should encompass sensitivity to environmental change, socioeconomic vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Many global food system scenarios are derived for specialised purposes, such as estimating global market prices. Often they do not adequately frame food insecurity in its several dimensions. For instance, the IPCC’s SRES scenarios were developed to bracket global greenhouse gas emissions. While they fulfil this aim, they are not adequate to understand climate vulnerability—even in the ‘poorest’ scenario per capita GDP in developing countries reaches the present OECD level by the time climate impacts become significant.
2. Vulnerability is a multi-scale phenomenon, and a consistent treatment from household to province to nation to world is required. The linkages are essentially related to processes and pathways rather than downscaled parameters or upscaled aggregation.
3. At the intermediate scale, where livelihood groups and systems operate, linkages can be drawn between the global and local, and between descriptions of conditions to analyses of processes. Livelihood analysis has become quite common in development planning,but few if any examples of longer term food security scenarios explicitly relate to livelihoods.
4. Scenarios are intended to provide insight and this is strengthened through a participatory process. So, methods of stakeholder participation are essential, and need to be matched to the level of analysis.

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