1.
Targeting capacity
building for quantitative
foresight modeling
Gerald Nelson
Senior Research Fellow
IFPRI
INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

2.
Who is the user?
 Policy users
• High level policy makers
• Policy staff [advisor to policy maker]
• Technical staff
 Research users
• Foresight modelers
• Researchers and research funders
 Range of end users
• Civil society organizations
• Private sector [includes farmers, input suppliers, downstream and
upstream businesses, etc.)

3.
What is the question?
For the Global Futures project….
If an investor provides an additional $x million
to the CGIAR, how should it be spent to
provide the greatest return on investment?
• Financial ROI
• Reduction in poverty
• Improvements in sustainability
 Global Futures project develops methods,
tools, and a consistent system to help the
CGIAR answer this question.
 Plausible scenarios are key

4.
Overall scenarios:
Plausible futures for population and GDP growth
 Optimistic
• High GDP and low population growth
 Baseline
• Medium GDP and medium population growth
 Pessimistic
• Low GDP and high population growth

5.
Five climate scenarios
 Climate scientists “All scenarios have equal
probability.”
 Our modeling approach, for each overall
scenario, use climate scenarios from…
• Two GCMs – MIROC (Japanese) and CSIRO
(Australian) with
• Two SRES scenarios – A1B and B1
• Perfect mitigation

6.
Climate change scenario effects differ
(price increase (%), 2010 – 2050, Baseline economy and
demography)
Minimum and maximum
effect from four climate
scenarios

7.
Assessing food security and climate change
outcomes
3,600
Optimistic scenario Pessimistic scenario
Developed
3,400 countries
3,200
3,000
2,800 All developing
Kcals/day
countries Perfect
2,600 mitigation
2,400
Low-income developing
2,200 countries
2,000
1,800

8.
ROI, Drought Tolerant Groundnut
(Proof of Concept Only)
Welfare and returns on Climate change scenarios
investment
No climate MIROC MIROC CSIRO CSIRO
change 369 A1B 369 B1 369 A1B 369 B1
Changes in producer surplus
-3,876 -4,275 -3,790 -4,540 -4,698
(NPV, m US$)
Changes in consumer surplus
10,443 11,338 10,082 11,997 12,507
(NPV, m US$)
6,567 7,063 6,292 7,457 7,809
Net welfare change (NPV, m US$)
Cost (NPV, m US$) 15 15 15 15 15
Benefit-cost ratio 448 482 430 509 533
Net benefits (NPV, m US$) 6,553 7,048 6,277 7,443 7,795
IRR (%) 54 55 53 55 56

9.
Welfare Effects: Drought-tolerant groundnut
(Proof of concept only)
D Malnourished D At Risk of
Target D Kcals per $
Regions children per $ Hunger per $
countries invested
invested invested (million)
Malawi 1.9 -1,285 -6.1
ESA Tanzania 0.6 -672 -3.6
Uganda 1.7 -1,824 0.0
Burkina Faso 3.6 -1,666 -1.8
Ghana 3.1 -904 0.0
WCA
Mali 2.5 -935 0.0
Nigeria 4.4 -13,604 -4.9
Senegal 5.6 -973 0.0
India 0.9 -8,840 -32.0
Indonesia 1.2 -1,429 0.0
SSEA
Myanmar 3.0 -971 -6.9
Vietnam 1.0 -511 -1.4

10.
Global Futures outputs
 Strategic foresight quantitative modeling
tools for ex ante evaluation of promising
technologies
 Outreach – Food Security Futures
Conference
• first scheduled tentatively April 11-12, 2013
 Capacity building
• To increase range of foresight tools available to
users