Climate Impacts
The Climate Impacts Group furthers understanding of the impacts of climate variability and change on food security. We are a group of physical and social scientists working together to define climate impacts on agricultural livelihoods and to develop adaptation and mitigation strategies. Our primary tools are climate and crop models, which include DSSAT CROPGRO, ORYZA V3 and JULES-Crop.
Our own in-house model, the General Large Area Model for annual crops (GLAM) is designed with the explicit purpose of being compatible with climate model output.
Examples of our current work include
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Food Systems Transformation in Southern Africa for One Health (FoSTA-Health): Our work combines stakeholder engagement and grounded research in case study contexts in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia. We lead on the integrated modelling analysis using iFEED to explore associated changes in animal, human and environmental health.
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Increasing UK Dietary Fibre - The Case for the Great White British Loaf (HiFi): Our work focuses on developing a new approach to predict winter wheat yields using biomass calculated from Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data: the General Large Area Model for annual crops using Satellite remote sensing data (GLAM-Sat). A gridded implementation of this modelling framework is being developed to predict winter wheat yields across the UK, with a logistic curve used to finish the growing season at different lead times.
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Innovation in sustainability, policy, adaptation and resilience in Kenya: iSPARK focusses on metrics for sustainable and resilient agriculture that span scales from farmers’ fields to country and from seasons to decades.
- Climate Variability and Human Health: We are in the process of developing new crop models to assess the impact of ozone on the production of major cereal crops.
Contact us
If you would like to discuss an area of research in more detail please contact the Research Group Lead: Professor Andy Challinor
Research team
Postgraduate researchers