2022 Laureate works to adjust growing crops in changing climate

From her start in New York, through the time she spent in Europe, followed by a return to the states and her current work with NASA, Cynthia Rosenzweig has kept a central focus on climate change and how it relates to growing crops. 

While working on her PHD, she contributed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s first assessment of the potential effects of climate change on the environment which later led to the basis for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig/2022 World Food Prize Laureate: “My first peer reviewed journal article is in 1985, in the journal climatic change, and it took the projections coming from the guests climate model. And it was an expert system, it was a different kind of model. The model that we use that I developed there was an expert system to give the rules for where different kinds of wheat can grow.”

Rosenzweig’s research was the basis for the United Nations 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change. 

Just a few years earlier, her work on creating a standard for climate and food production modeling, led to the formation of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project or AgMIP, an organization of experts working to improve the predictions and performance of world food systems in the face of an ever-growing climate crisis. AgMIP’S detailed models and data guide policymakers and stakeholders to implement farmer focused strategies that improve global food systems amid the impacts of climate change.

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig/2022 World Food Prize Laureate: “Now we're all working together so that we can nail uncertainties, we can understand the processes we can improve the models and thus improve the projections, so we can develop adaptation strategies for all the different regions of the world.”

Twenty low and middle income countries are already carrying out many of AgMIP’s initiatives with the help of the organization's more than 200 policymakers and practitioners. Real-world implementation is already happening in Pakistan as leaders update land use planning tools and crop cultivation information for local farmers. 

With AgMIP, Rosenzweig led teams in Sub-Saharan Africa to develop a regional integrated assessment methodology for climate change impacts. 

Stakeholders in Ghana and Senegal, among others, spurred the research and development for regional plans to help build food capacity. Now, these same tools are being used to make farming and food systems around the world more resilient to substantial shocks like COVID-19 and weather extremes.

For her work in this field, Rosenzweig was awarded the 2022 World Food Prize at  the Laureate Ceremony, which took place last October inside the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines.   

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig/2022 World Food Prize Laureate: Food Systems are emerging at the forefront of climate change action. We now know that climate change cannot be restrained, without attention to the greenhouse gas emissions coming from food systems. But at the same time, food security for all cannot be provided without resilience to increasing climate extremes.

Rosenweig took a moment to thank those on the front lines of AgMIP. 

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig/2022 World Food Prize Laureate: “I salute the members of this network for their tireless work helping their own and other countries to achieve food security, both now and in the future, under changing climate conditions.”

She also issued one last challenge to the global audience about the future of feeding the world’s children. 

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig/2022 World Food Prize Laureate: “We need to do everything we can to ensure food security, and a livable planet for them.”