Researchers, policy makers, entrepreneurs and development practitioners working to improve food security, environmental health and rural livelihoods in the developing world face many uncertainties when exploring the future of food systems. It is difficult to predict what economic, political and social conditions will be like in the next few years and virtually impossible to predict the medium to longer term. Climate change and variability are among the greatest unknowns, and are likely to have far- reaching effects on food security, environments and livelihoods.
This working paper presents four alternative plausible futures, or scenarios, for food security, environments and livelihoods in West Africa. The scenarios are based on different assumptions and pathways of socio-economic and political development. They were developed under the auspices of CGIAR’s Research Programme 7: Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). A number of workshops, attended by stakeholders, drawn from governments, civil society, the research community and the media, fed into the development process. The scenarios describe trends and events since 2010 up to 2050. These scenarios were translated to semi-quantitative assessments of a range of drivers and indicators and quantified with two agricultural economic models, IMPACT, developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and GLOBIOM, developed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The separate presentation of the semi-quantitative and quantitative results in this report allows the stories to flow and also makes it easier for the reader to compare data between the different scenarios