Climatologist and agronomist Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, who’s a senior analysis scientist and head of the Local weather Impacts Group at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Area Research, has been awarded the 2022 World Meals Prize from the World Meals Prize Basis.
Conceived of because the “Nobel Prize for Meals and Agriculture,” in accordance with the World Meals Prize Basis, the World Meals Prize has “a mission to raise improvements and encourage motion to sustainably enhance the standard, amount and availability of meals for all,” a NASA press launch stated.
Rosenzweig, a former farmer, was chosen for the $250,000 prize for her analysis and projections on the affect of local weather change on world meals manufacturing. Modeling executed by Rosenzweig has given policymakers a foundation for local weather change mitigation methods and methods to adapt meals methods to modifications introduced on by the local weather disaster.
“Local weather change can’t be restrained with out consideration to meals system emissions, and meals safety for all can’t be supplied with out resilience to growing local weather extremes,” Rosenzweig stated, in accordance with a press launch from The World Meals Prize Basis.
Rosenzweig used NASA fashions and satellite tv for pc information to check agricultural areas throughout the globe and the modifications they’re experiencing, the NASA press launch stated. Rosenzweig is a co-founder of the worldwide Agricultural Mannequin Intercomparison and Enchancment Challenge (AgMIP), which makes use of crop modeling, local weather science and financial modeling to look at meals safety and crop yield.
Greater than 1,000 researchers have labored with AgMIP to judge local weather change’s future impacts on meals and agriculture methods and to enhance the agricultural fashions and methods used to take action. In her work with the AgMIP, Rosenzweig has studied how rising atmospheric carbon emissions have an effect on crops and calculated the quantity of greenhouse fuel emissions produced by meals manufacturing.
The World Meals Prize Basis stated Rosenzweig’s AgMIP management has aided policymakers in additional than 90 nations.
“We principally can not clear up local weather change until we deal with the problems of the greenhouse fuel emissions from the meals system, and we can not present meals safety for all until we work actually onerous to develop resilient methods,” Rosenzweig advised The Related Press earlier than the ceremony.
Rosenzweig’s first forecasts of the consequences of local weather change on North American meals manufacturing had been in 1985, and in 1994 she made world projections, the World Meals Prize Basis stated in its press launch.
A local of Scarsdale, New York, and self-described local weather affect scientist, Rosenzweig moved to Tuscany, Italy, along with her associate Arthur when she was in her 20s, the place she developed her curiosity in agriculture, reported The Guardian.
Rosenzweig and her associate grew fruit and veggies and raised goats, chickens and pigs in Tuscany, the World Meals Prize Basis stated. Upon returning to New York in 1972, Rosenzweig studied agriculture at a technical faculty and he or she and Arthur began Blue Heron Farm with pals.
“Local weather change has already had a big and adverse affect on world agricultural manufacturing and its affect is just going to worsen. We’re seeing rice fields drown in floods. We’re seeing different crops wither in drought. We’re seeing shellfish die in additional acidic oceans and crop ailments are spreading to new areas. We probably wouldn’t perceive all these issues in addition to we do at present with out the work of Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, this 12 months’s World Meals prize laureate,” stated Below Secretary for Financial Progress, Power, and the Setting Jose Fernandez, as reported by The Guardian.
The World Meals Prize was created in 1986 by Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug. The announcement of the recipient of the World Meals Prize was made throughout a U.S. Division of State ceremony, and Rosenzweig will formally obtain the prize at one other ceremony in October.
“Local weather change can’t be restrained with out consideration to meals system emissions, and meals safety for all can’t be supplied with out resilience to growing local weather extremes. I salute the modelers all over the world within the Agricultural Mannequin Intercomparison and Enchancment Challenge (AgMIP) for his or her tireless work serving to international locations to attain meals safety each now and sooner or later underneath altering local weather situations. As we transfer into a vital decade of motion on local weather change, meals must be ‘on the desk,’” Rosenzweig stated, because the World Meals Prize Basis reported.
