7th AgMIP Global Workshop

Workshop Goals

1. Demonstrate how AgMIP can help address major global and national challenges including the Sustainable Development Goals and climate change mitigation and adaptation planning
2. Convene the agricultural modeling community and share AgMIP vision, latest findings, activities, and focus areas
3. Identify opportunities for major stakeholder-driven efforts related to Next Generation Tools, Coordinated Global and Regional Assessments, and Sustainable Farming Systems
4. Bolster AgMIP Initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean
5. Plan AgMIP activities and outputs for the years ahead

These goals are accomplished through three major workshop elements:

• Engagement with the Community – Presentations of priority stakeholder needs, current state-of-the-art science, cutting-edge research topics, and applied assessments by participants around the world will make the 7th AgMIP Global Workshop a prime destination for top researchers in the field to share their work and learn from others. The workshop also provides a unique opportunity for policymakers and stakeholders to engage directly with leading international experts. This will ensure that AgMIP continues to be driven by the findings and application experiences of its expert community.
• Development of Core AgMIP Themes – in 2015, AgMIP committed to advance research to enable outcomes in three overlapping areas or pillars. These include:
  • Sustainable Farming Systems Modeling – Key messages from linked multi-model methods assess the impact of agricultural and policy interventions to meet resilience, adaptation, and mitigation targets of communities, districts, and nations. Presentation and work sessions will allow for comparison with other approaches, and consideration of supply chains or value chains that also need to evolve if productivity gains are to translate to improved livelihoods of farmers. 
  • Coordinated Global and Regional Assessments – Advances in multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-model linkages to address current and future challenges will be presented, with a particular focus on connecting biophysical and socioeconomic information to food security and nutrition metrics that are critical to future planning. Work sessions will provide the opportunity to contribute to improved assessment protocols, prioritize current challenges and future scenarios to address, and collaborate in implementation planning to ensure timely impact by the community of researchers.
  • Next Generation Data, Models, Tools and Knowledge – Topics to be covered will include data discovery, harmonization, and use; big data; machine learning; model improvement; and online tools to improve decision support and accessibility to research results. Work sessions will advance coherence in approach and the transfer of best practices, to enable better access to existing data and tools, as well as prioritization of next developments.
• Planning the next phase of Research and Regional Applications – Groups will convene to prioritize and organize the next phase of research, including further contributions to each of the Core Themes above to ensure that theoretical advances are making their way into applications that improve the information base for stakeholder decisions.