Gerald Charles Nelson

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics

Temperate perennial fruit and nut trees play varying roles in world food diversity-providing edible oils and micronutrient, energy, and protein dense foods. In addition, perennials reuse significant amounts of biomass each year providing a unique resilience. But they also have a unique sensitivity to seasonal temperatures, requiring a period of dor...

Simultaneous crop failures in multiple major producing regions (breadbaskets) threaten both local and global food security. Evidence of their frequency and impact has recently become more available. We conducted a systematic literature search and identified 30 articles published between 2019 and 2022. Historically, synchronized crop-production loss...

Background Heat stress in animals is one of the major climate change impacts on domesticated livestock raised in both intensive and extensive production systems. At temperatures higher than an animal's thermoneutral zone, heat stress can affect liveweight gain, milk yield, and fertility. Animal welfare may also be negatively affected by heat stress...

Reliable estimates of the impacts of climate change on crop production are critical for assessing the sustainability of food systems. Global, regional, and site-specific crop simulation studies have been conducted for nearly four decades, representing valuable sources of information for climate change impact assessments. However, the wealth of data...

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to have major impacts on domesticated livestock, including increased heat stress in animals in both intensive and extensive livestock systems. We estimate the changes in the number of extreme heat stress days per year for animals raised outdoors that can be expected in the major domesticated animal species (...

In 2017–2018, a group of international development funding agencies launched the Crops to End Hunger initiative to modernize public plant breeding in lower-income countries. To inform that initiative, USAID asked the International Food Policy Research Institute and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service to estimate...

In 2017-2018, a group of international development funding agencies launched the Crops to End Hunger initiative to modernize public plant breeding in lower-income countries. To inform that initiative, USAID asked the International Food Policy Research Institute and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service to estimate...

This book contains 18 chapters that describes the evolving and multi-faceted roles of ILRI in addressing these and other global challenges in nearly a half century of research. ILRI researchers and partners took leading roles, for example, in the following. This volume can serve as a reference and resource for all interested in the role of livestoc...

Twenty-first-century challenges for food and nutrition security include the spread of obesity worldwide and persistent undernutrition in vulnerable populations, along with continued micronutrient deficiencies. Climate change, increasing incomes and evolving diets complicate the search for sustainable solutions. Projecting to the year 2050, we explo...

Nutrition science-based dietary advice urges changes that may have a great impact on agricultural systems. For example, the 2016 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) recommends greatly increased fruit and vegetable consumption, but the present domestic production is insufficient to accommodate large-scale adoption of these guidelines. Increasing...

Background Information about the global structure of agriculture and nutrient production and its diversity is essential to improve present understanding of national food production patterns, agricultural livelihoods, and food chains, and their linkages to land use and their associated ecosystems services. Here we provide a plausible breakdown of gl...

Background Information about the global structure of agriculture and nutrient production and its diversity is essential to improve present understanding of national food production patterns, agricultural livelihoods, and food chains, and their linkages to land use and their associated ecosystems services. Here we provide a plausible breakdown of gl...

Background Information about the global structure of agriculture and nutrient production and its diversity is essential to improve present understanding of national food production patterns, agricultural livelihoods, and food chains, and their linkages to land use and their associated ecosystems services. Here we provide a plausible breakdown of gl...

Climate change is expected to impact global food supply and food security by affecting growing conditions for agricultural production. Process-based dynamic growth models are important tools to estimate crop yields based on minimum inputs of climate, soil, crop management, and crop cultivar parameters. Using region-specific cultivar parameters is c...

We're being warned of future grain failures—not by the dreams of a biblical Pharaoh, but by modern computer model predictions. Climate science forecasts rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and episodes of increasingly extreme weather, which will harm crop yields at a time when the world's growing population can ill afford declines, esp...

Climate change is now affecting agriculture and food production in every country of the world. Here the authors present the IMPACT model results on yield, production, and net trade of major crops in China, and on daily calorie availability as an overall indicator of food security under climate change scenarios and socio-economic pathways in 2050. T...

Agriculture is unique among economic sectors in the nature of impacts from climate change. The production activity that transforms inputs into agricultural outputs involves direct use of weather inputs (temperature, solar radiation available to the plant, and precipitation). Previous studies of the impacts of climate change on agriculture have repo...

Understanding the capacity of agricultural systems to feed the world population under climate change requires projecting future food demand. This article reviews demand modeling approaches from 10 global economic models participating in the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). We compare food demand projections in 205...

Recent studies assessing plausible futures for agricultural markets and global food security have had contradictory outcomes. To advance our understanding of the sources of the differences, 10 global economic models that produce long-term scenarios were asked to compare a reference scenario with alternate socioeconomic, climate change, and bioenerg...

Changes in agricultural land use have important implications for environmental services. Previous studies of agricultural land-use futures have been published indicating large uncertainty due to different model assumptions and methodologies. In this article we present a first comprehensive comparison of global agro-economic models that have harmoni...

Significance Plausible estimates of climate change impacts on agriculture require integrated use of climate, crop, and economic models. We investigate the contribution of economic models to uncertainty in this impact chain. In the nine economic models included, the direction of management intensity, area, consumption, and international trade respon...

Agriculture looms high in the economies of ASARECA countries, making the region vulnerable to climate change related impacts (table 1). Greater variations in precipitation patterns increase the likelihood of short-run crop failures and long-run production declines. The impacts are expected to be: direct, on crops and livestock productivity; indirec...

This issue of Agricultural Economics is a special issue containing articles on model performance in assessing the effects of climate change, bioenergy policy, and socioeconomics on agriculture. The contributions present results from a global economic model intercomparison activity undertaken as part of the AgMIP Project (www.agmip.org). The origins...

The global change research community has recognized that new pathway and scenario concepts are needed to implement impact and vulnerability assessment that is logically consistent across local, regional and global scales. For impact and vulnerability assessment, new socio-economic pathway and scenario concepts are being developed. Representative Ag...

Global climate change presents long-term risks to agriculture. In general, global climate change is expected to positively affect Russian agriculture. In high and middle latitudes, global warming would expand the growing season. Acreages of agricultural crops may expand toward the north, although yields would likely be lower due to less fertile soi...

Agriculture drives the economies and accounts for 43 percent of the annual gross domestic product (GDP) in ten countries of Eastern and Central Africa (ECA): Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. In Burundi, DRC, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Tanzania, agriculture accounts for...

Efforts are under way in the agricultural research for development community to employ crop growth simulation models for the ex-ante assessment of the impacts of agricultural technologies, in particular improved crop varieties. The approach, dubbed “virtual crop modelling”, consists in the manipulation of genetic coefficients of the cultivars conta...

The projected changes in planted area, yield per area, net exports/imports and prices for five major agricultural crops in South Africa were simulated using the projections of four Global Circulation Models (GCMs) under three socio-economic scenarios. The GCM projections show consistent strong warming over the subcontinent, but disagree with respec...

Agreement is developing among agricultural scientists on the emerging inability of agriculture to meet growing global food demands. Changes in trends of weather conditions projected by global climate models will challenge physiological limits of crops and exacerbate the global food challenge by 2050. These climate- and constraint-driven crop produc...

The conceptual underpinning for process-based crop simulation models is to model the direct effect of differing climates on the biology of production. The three types of assessment methods can be used relatively easily in the narrow economic context of a particular type of crop for some specified geographic region. Moving from a local to a global e...

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. The goals of AgMI...

There is broad consensus among scientists that climate change is altering weather patterns around the world. However, economists are only beginning to develop comprehensive tools that allow for the quantification of such weather changes on countries’ economies and people. This paper presents a modeling suite that links the downscaling of global cli...

The first of three books in IFPRI’s climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa — Benin, Burkina Faso, CA´te d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo — and...

The second of three books in IFPRI's climate change in Africa series, East African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 10 of the countries that make up east and central Africa - Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda - and...

There is widespread agreement that our ability to deliver sustainable food security for all will be challenged in three dimensions — population growth, constrained natural resources, and climate change. The latest Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World (FAO 2012), estimates th...

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a major international effort linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate impact projections for the agricultural sector. The goals of AgMI...

Agriculture and food security are key sectors for intervention under climate change. Agricultural production is highly vulnerable even to 2C (low-end) predictions for global mean temperatures in 2100, with major implications for rural poverty and for both rural and urban food security. Agriculture also presents untapped opportunities for mitigation...

Climate change, growing demand for agricultural products and a narrowing natural resource base exert growing pressures on the global food system and challenge its ability to supply sufficient quantities of adequate food for a growing world population. Part of the solution is investing in agricultural research to develop improved crop technologies a...

Climate change is a major threat to sustainable food security. Temperatures are rising, precipitation patterns are changing, and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently. As a result, producing enough to feed a growing population is becoming more challenging. Everyone in the agriculture sector must adapt—and quickly. Delays now will rai...

Although irrigation in Africa has the potential to boost agricultural productivities by at least 50%, food production on the continent is almost entirely rainfed. The area equipped for irrigation, currently slightly more than 13 million hectares, makes up just 6% of the total cultivated area. More than 70% of Africa’s poor live in rural areas and m...

To achieve food security for many in low-income and middle-income countries for whom this is already a challenge, especially with the additional complications of climate change, will require early investment to support smallholder farming systems and the associated food systems that supply poor consumers. We need both local and global policy-linked...