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

Identifying case study sitesResearch designed to address the regional-level, subregional-level and cross-level questionsidentified above will give insights into how food systems operate across a region, how thisdiversity affects food security across a region, and what possible adaptation strategies can beconsidered both locally and for the region as a whole. However, selecting case study sitesacross a diverse region necessitates a compromise between optimal scientific and practicalconsiderations. One aim can be to build on on-going research infrastructure and researchsites, and existing data, rather than establishing research sites de novo. An initial useful stepcan be to survey existing work in the region to see what to build on, and also to show wherenew studies can add value to others by ‘mapping’ them onto the research structure of the newstudy. This type of information can be used to identify research projects for which suitablesocio-economic and environmental data are already available, and would help to build upregional research networks (as have been very successfully developed by the Inter-AmericanInstitute for Global Change Research, IAI). It would also enable an analysis of existing workthat can be integrated to help address the research agenda and to identify where the majorgaps appear to lie. Box 4 illustrates the process of case study site selection in the GECAFSwork in the Indo-Gangetic Plain.Box 4 Identifying research sites for multilevel research.Choosing case-study sites is a critical part of multilevel research, and should ideally be based ondiscussion among all stakeholders. For GEC/food security research, some selection criteria couldinclude: lie-along gradients of, for example, anticipated temperature and precipitation change or currentand anticipated grazing pressure; sufficient representation of different governance (e.g. land tenure) arrangements; sufficient representation of the region’s principal farming systems (Dixon et al., 2001); sufficient representation of key drivers in regional scenarios (see Box 3); building on work where interventions have been shown to be effective.The aim is to identify a set of sites that are individually representative of the specificsubregion/selection criteria, and which, when considered as a whole set, give a good representation ofthe region overall and the heterogeneity within it. This might need an integrative approach, as provedto be the case in selecting GECAFS research sites in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP).A workshop was convened to identify five case study sites reflecting the socio-economic andenvironmental diversity of the IGP. Administrative districts were chosen as this was the unit forwhich socio-economic data was generally collected. Initial suggestions were presented for a site ineach of the five rice-wheat subregions across the IGP (as identified by the Consultative Group onInternational Agricultural Research (CGIAR)-supported Rice-Wheat Consortium). Criteria includedidentifying where the effects of various GEC drivers will be most extreme and where those living inpoverty will be worst hit. The likelihood of data availability was also an important consideration.When all five sites had been presented, they were considered in terms of balance of GEC drivers and98