GLASSNET’s impact on key stakeholders will make a difference in achieving the SDGs. Our network has the potential to provide decision makers from a wide-array of areas with the data needed to properly assess actions that will affect the environment, the economy and local communities.
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Dr. Aline Mosnier
Listen to Dr. Aline Mosnier, Scientific Director of the FABLE Consortium, discuss her evolution as a researcher and policy advisor. This is an excerpt from a recent early career workshop, organized by GLASSNET Fellow, Vartika Singh, IFPRI senior research analyst and PhD student at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Dr. Mosnier works with country teams to develop rigorous quantitative national pathways towards sustainable land use and food systems by 2050. Prior to joining SDSN, Aline worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where she contributed to the development of the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM. In particular, her work focused on international trade in agricultural products, indirect impacts of biofuel policies, climate change impacts on agriculture, and deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics. With teams from local research institutes, she has worked on the co-development of regional versions of GLOBIOM in the Congo Basin, Brazil and Indonesia. Finally, she has developed the FABLE calculator, a simplified country-Excel-based accounting tool on the food and land system. Aline holds a PhD in Agricultural and Environment Economics from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences of Vienna and a master's in development economics from CERDI-Université d'Auvergne of Clermont-Ferrand.
A decentralized approach to model national and global food and land use systems
The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food and land use system transformation in collaboration with stakeholders. An online platform connects the national models, iteratively balances global exports and imports, and aggregates results to the global level. Our results show that actions toward greater sustainability in countries could sum up to 1 Mha net forest gain per year, 950 Mha net gain in the land where natural processes predominate, and an increased CO2 sink of 3.7 GtCO2e yr−1 over the period 2020–2050 compared to current trends, while average food consumption per capita remains above the adequate food requirements in all countries. We show examples of how the global linkage impacts national results and how different assumptions in national pathways impact global results. This modeling setup acknowledges the broad heterogeneity of socio-ecological contexts and the fact that people who live in these different contexts should be empowered to design the future they want. But it also demonstrates to local decision-makers the interconnectedness of our food and land use system and the urgent need for more collaboration to converge local and global priorities.
This workshop is the first in a series of GLASSNET workshops aimed at equipping early career researchers with the skills and mindset necessary for navigating the dynamic and interconnected world of contemporary scientific research. This session delves into the pivotal role of transdisciplinary and transnational research, encouraging young scholars to embrace a broader perspective in shaping their research endeavors. The three speakers below discussed how they have incorporated interdisciplinary, international dimensions into their research. Using diverse methods such as modelling, spatial analysis, and empirical research, these speakers detail their experiences of navigating the inter-relationships between food-land-water-energy topics.
This workshop was organized and chaired by Vartika Singh. Vartika is a Senior Research Analyst in the Natural Resources and Resilience Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute, in New Delhi. She also holds the position of Senior Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. She is currently pursuing her PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and is a guest researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
Michael Crawford is a quantitative modeler in the department of Transformation Pathways, where he supports the work of the Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) and contribute to the maintenance and development of the MAgPIE model within the Land-Use Management working group. His scientific training was in ecology with Prof. Dr. Florian Jeltsch and Prof. Dr. Volker Grimm at the Universität Potsdam, where Michael used individual-based models to investigate grassland plant community assembly
Avinash Kishore is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, based in IFPRI’s South Asia Office in New Delhi. His research focuses on understanding how public policies and markets affect the adoption and non-adoption of sustainable technologies and practices in agriculture in South Asia. He leads research projects on understanding food systems in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal and the policy research component of the Cereals Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA)—a program implemented jointly by CIMMYT, IFPRI, and IRRI.
Aline Mosnier is the Scientific Director for the FABLE Consortium. She works with country teams to develop rigorous quantitative national pathways towards sustainable land use and food systems by 2050. Prior to joining SDSN, Aline worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where she contributed to the development of the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM.
Watch the full workshop and others on GLASSNET YouTube Channel.