From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

an average of two years to coalesce. The core team did not foresee that it would take this longfor scientists from different institutions and different disciplines to successfully work togetherin a regional mode, but on global questions. In hindsight this seems naïve, but at the time allthe scientists were focusing on the contents of the research and just did not think about whatit takes to build a team in one location (let alone in multiple locations in parallel). Thetransaction costs of learning to work together at each benchmark site were compounded bythose associated with the need for overall coordination and communication. The differentteams at each site consisted of scientists from research institutions (national andinternational), from NGOs and from universities. Some had previous experience withparticipatory research methods; others had none. It quickly became obvious that it wasessential to reconcile the objectives of the programme with the expectations of each teammember at a given site. The differing roles of these participants required almost constantrenegotiations on the part of the overall coordinator.One dimension of the ASB approach, the use of ‘standardized’ methods at each site tofacilitate cross or interregional analyses of results, proved difficult to implement at first. Eachbenchmark team considered that the set of methods proposed by the programme needed to besignificantly amended to account for the particularities of their own site. The analysis of dataacross the benchmark areas and the global results were indeed not a very strong motivationfor some of these teams, until it was agreed that the global or cross-site analysis would beundertaken by all interested scientists, no matter whether they were located at a given site orwere part of the initial core team. A geo-referenced database was developed to facilitate thesynthesis of results and the sharing of information across the regional teams. After a fewyears of data collection at each benchmark area, and once some of the regional results startedbeing analysed from a global perspective, the regional teams became almost more interestedin the global analysis than in the production of a full analysis of their own data.Using integrated scenario analyses for facilitating regional-level analysesScenario development and analysis has already been successfully used at a global level tohelp reveal and address knowledge gaps about the plausible future interactions between GECand a number of ecosystem goods and services, e.g. food production or water availability orclimate regulation. Such studies are often called ‘integrated’ as they include (i) social,economic and environmental processes and scientific disciplines; (ii) cover multiple levels onmultiple scales; and (iii) strongly involve stakeholders. Such scenarios can be eitherqualitative (stories) or quantitative (models) or both.Scenario analyses conducted at the regional level help to systematically explore policy andtechnical options at the appropriate level by providing a suitable framework for (i) raisingawareness of key environmental and policy concerns; (ii) discussing viable adaptationoptions; and (iii) analysing the possible consequences of different adoption options for foodsecurity and environmental goals. These can be based on scenarios developed at the globallevel (e.g. the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report onEmissions Scenarios (IPCC, 2000); the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (MA, 2005) and94