Nutrition security, health and environmental systems are closely interlinked and need to be jointly managed. This requires long-term monitoring and observations systems, modelling and assessment tools, as well as integrated technological and institutional solutions. NUTRI-SCOPE will link global-scale, long-term scenarios on the food system under socio-economic and environmental change with a well-selected sample of empirical sub-national assessments of nutritional impacts in children under five. Bridging global and sub-national scales will be facilitated by specific national socio-economic assessments. Within the existing INDEPTH network of long-term health and demographic surveillance systems we will determine the causal relationships between environmental changes, food availability, nutritional status and health indicators. The derived impact functions will be used in national and global-scale models to generate future scenarios on nutrition and public health under socio-economic and environmental changes. With this modelling framework, integrated technological and institutional solutions for improving nutrition security and health will be assessed, contributing to improved policy decisions. The initial focus will be on six countries in Africa and Asia, including ground-truthing of modelling results. The long-term goal is to establish an integrated, multi-scale monitoring and assessment framework at the interface between the global food system, public health, nutrition, and environmental change.

The increase in migration into EU member countries in 2015, and the socio-political challenges associated with it, have led the EU to set out a strategy to tackle root causes of irregular migration in the countries of origin. Crop failure caused by climate change, in particular, is forecast to be a major driver of international migration in the coming decades. In this project, we will integrate state-of-the-art climate, crop, economic and migration models in order to predict potential migration flows, driven by climate-change-related crop failure, from African and Middle Eastern countries into EU member states until the year 2050. We go on identify optimal adaptation strategies in countries at risk, which can stabilise agricultural production and help minimise future migration pressures. By using multi-model projections, and performing in-depth model uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, we will generate robust projections driven by the best data available, and ensure a transparent assessment of uncertainties. Our results will inform evidence-based action by EU policy makers aimed at minimising future large-scale forced migration driven by climate change. This highly interdisciplinary project will give the Experienced Researcher the opportunity to complement his background in agro-environmental modelling, by developing expertise in the socio-economic dimensions of global food production under climate change. Home to world-leading experts of all disciplines relevant to the project, and exceptionally well connected with national and international governmental and non-governmental bodies, both the Host Institution (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) and the Secondment Host Institution (International Organization for Migration) will provide a unique environment for ensuring the highest-quality research and training during the fellowship, as well as the effective communication of results to EU policy makers and the wider public.

Children in low- and middle-income countries are among those most at risk to the health impacts of climate change, not least through undernutrition, which has serious long-lasting consequences for individuals and society and may undermine decades of global health gains. Attribution science can drive urgent societal action. However, it is currently limited in scope, focusing mostly on heat and adult populations in high-income settings, largely because of the lack of accessible tools, methods, data, and interdisciplinary expertise. To fill this research gap, this project will derive multiple climate attribution datasets, advance process-based crop models, and apply econometric, epidemiological and health impact assessment methods on underused data sources in order to quantify the already occurring impacts of climate change on child health. These will be integrated into an interactive digital open source tool (MILK). MILK will be co-designed in a series of workshops with the interdisciplinary project team and scientists and stakeholders from West Africa, Central/Eastern Africa, and South Asia. The attribution results will be set into the context of mitigation and adaptation options and complemented with an intergenerational justice perspective.The involvement of policy makers will be ensured throughout the project to advance the policy integration of the generated evidence.

Minimising the welfare cost of climate change requires effective adaptation policies. Consequently, the EU strategy on climate change adaptation prioritises the creation of ‘frameworks, models and tools to support decision-making and to assess [the effectiveness of] various adaptation measures’. Accurate measurement of welfare cost is a prerequisite for effective policy prioritisation. The current state of the art quantifies welfare costs using aggregated methodologies. This has been shown to bias cost estimation and does not capture the socioeconomic distribution of welfare impacts. This bias may therefore affect the effectiveness of adaptation measures. Integrating climate impact models (with which Prof Lotze-Campen and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research [PIK] are experts) with Spatial Microsimulation (SM) modelling (with which the experienced researcher, Dr. Farrell, is an expert) provides a framework to estimate micro-level welfare impacts and thus overcome these deficiencies. Furthermore, this project integrates these estimates into decision-making models to aid policy. This project provides: (1) a timely contribution; (2) a strong multidisciplinary focus; (3) a transfer of SM knowledge to PIK, improving their ability to quantify the welfare impacts of climate change; (4) strong training in climate science and decision-making tools for Dr. Farrell; (5) strong communication/dissemination strategy drawing on resources of Dr. Farrell and PIK. The value of this project is in the collaborative opportunities provided by the research fellowship. PIK provides the best possible opportunities for mentorship and training/professional development for Dr. Farrell. This establishes Dr. Farrell as the leading expert in an emerging field of micro-based welfare estimation of climate change impacts and, coupled with the integration of the research networks of Dr. Farrell and PIK, provides a platform through which many further career developments are possible.

The What Works Climate Solutions Summit is a transdisciplinary, inclusive, high-level conference to promote and catalyze synthetic evidence on climate solutions for upcoming climate change assessments – particularly the IPCC’s 7th Assessment Report ─ as well as other forms of scientific policy advice. It brings together leading experts on climate solutions, key institutions curating scientific policy advice on climate change such as science assessment bodies (IPCC, UNEP Emissions Gap etc.) and science academies, evidence synthesis communities (Campbell Collaboration, Cochrane, Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, Evidence Synthesis International, Evidence-based Research Network) as well as policymakers, research funders and other users of evidence to make progress towards major goals: 1. Initiate an ambitious work program on climate solutions and advance evidence synthesis methods for evidence-based policy 2. Building evidence synthesis capacity across the climate community: 3. Establishing a dialogue and forming new collaborations for evidence-based climate solution 4. Mainstream the topic of health in the wider discourse on climate solutions in science, policy and practice