Building the vision for a more sustainable food future in Africa
At COP28 U.S. Secretary of State Blinken announced the commitment of $150 million to develop food crops well-suited to the changing climate in Africa. To support this substantial announcement for the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) the Plotline built and has launched the VACS Explorer to bring to life the research driving investments into key crops for African food security in a changing climate.
VACS Explorer is built on data produced by AgMIP projecting expected crop yields in a low or high emissions future. Earth Genome worked with our friends at Stamen Design to illustrate this data in a fresh and compelling visualization that clearly surfaces important information. Future crop yields are visualized in comparison to their historical levels, highlighting where crops will be harder or easier to grow in our changing climate. Crop yields can be compared against each other and assessed geographically across the continent to assist decisions on investments. VACS Explorer also profiles details on each crop including nutritional, genetic, and biophysical attributes. Today, the application is live to the general public at vacs.theplotline.org.
The VACS program is addressing the food future in Africa
Africa has been and will continue to be the region in the world most adversely affected by climate change. Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) addresses food security in Africa by developing and mobilizing investment in resilient, nutritious indigenous crops suited to the changing climate.
The importance of a program like this cannot be understated. In the words of Secretary Blinken:
“If parents can’t feed their children, nothing else matters…. We’re working with partners to rethink what, where, and how we produce food, in the context of a changing planet. Our goal is for farmers, for ranchers, to be able to sustainably achieve bigger yields of more nutritious crops, at lower costs, using less land, producing lower emissions.”
At The Plotline, we’ve worked closely with the Global Food Security group at the US Department of State researching and exploring topics that they’ve brought to our attention. We built a tool to explore the impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on grain production, developed a map based story on the 2022 flooding in Pakistan, and aggregated food insecurity data into an interactive application. These projects have all been focused on the past or current state of food systems. VACS is different — it’s a future focused vision crafted by a community most familiar with the shortcomings of our current food systems, designed to solve many of these challenges in a world where there will be more people to feed and a much harsher climate.
The Global Food Security group introduced us to the climate and agricultural modeling group, AgMIP, who had the task to make predictions on how climate will impact crops in the future.
We worked with AgMIP to take their preliminary results and develop the VACS Explorer application to bring to life the key insights. You can read more about how we worked with their data and prepared it for the application here. Below, we share a few insights and learnings we’ve found from using this tool.
Crops respond to climate change differently
These maps show the predicted yields for 20 crops across Africa in the year 2050, in a world that does not significantly cut back on greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, this represents the climate scenario SSP370. The green above indicates areas where crop yield is predicted to increase, yellow where the predicted yield would decrease. As this shows, certain crops like maize are projected to see more major impacts than crops indigenous to Africa like tef or fonio.
When comparing the scale of breeding programs supporting these three crops it’s evident that Maize is getting more support than the indigenous crops. If we want to seriously mitigate the harms of climate change on future food security, we need to invest more in resilient, nutritious indigenous crops suited to the changing climate.
Climate will influence nutrition not just calories
In the comparison tool of the VACS Explorer, crops are sorted by different nutritional parameters. Here are the top 5 crops as ranked by protein content.
Clicking into the explore page, it’s revealed that a high protein crop like soy bean is predicted to be greatly impacted by climate change in West Africa.
Food security projections often look at calories alone. Many high calorie crops like grains aren’t projected to decrease as significantly as high protein crops and high iron crops. Surfacing nutritional benefits of crops introduces a more nuanced lens for answering questions about how to both provide enough calories for a growing population and healthy plant based proteins and vitamin rich diets across the continent.
Greenhouse gas emissions will define the extremes
One of the more prominent insights of VACS Explorer is how higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the future will create more extreme outcomes. For any of the crops, the most obvious change between the high and low emissions scenarios is everything looking brighter. For example, take the legume lablab.
Where crops change in yield, these changes are more amplified by differences in projected emissions. This is even more evident when examining the charts on the map explorer page.
The white line on the strip plot illustrates crop yield under a low emission and high emission scenario, and shows a significant decrease of lablab yields in West Africa under a high emissions future. Even more interesting, the general trend is that many locations skew towards the extremes with the more regions seeing yields with higher decreases or sometimes increases. In the strip plot, this trend appears as more brightly colored lines towards the edges of the plot.
Feeding the future is a shared vision
Spending significant time analyzing the data in this application has offered a unique perspective into climate change and food security. We’re often presented with the narrative that climate change will negatively impact food systems in the future; this is true, but not a binary. Certain foods will do much better in a warmer climate and these are often crops that are historically grown in these regions. To feed a growing population and create a more food secure world amidst a changing climate we must not only learn from indigenous communities, but give these communities a voice and platform to share their knowledge. VACS is a good example of a program that is doing this and supporting this vision with significant investments.
Explore the application and learn for yourself the types of crops that will do better in a changing climate. Take note of the types of agriculture that are providing diverse nutrients and plant based proteins. Do you know organizations or programs driving investment, research, or distribution of locally adapted crops to historically food insecure communities? Please share in the comments or get in touch.
