Food Security and Biodiversity Conservation under Global Change

Agricultural systems will have to adapt to socio-economic and climate change in order to sustain food security in the future. However, these adaptations will likely drive negative environmental impacts, e.g., the loss of biodiversity. A key question, therefore, is how food security can be achieved, and, at the same time, how biodiversity can be preserved in the future. This dissertation aims to address this question by using the scenario and simulation methodology applied in four distinct studies. Study 1 investigates how biodiversity and food security can be reconciled under different simulated socio-economic and climate change conditions in Uganda. Study 2 tests the hypothesis that climate change impacts on food security requires analysis of mean crop yield as well as year-to-year crop yield variability. Study 3 comprehensively assesses the impacts of climate change on rain-fed crop yields in Africa and their potential implications on the continents’ food security. Finally, study 4 evaluates the effect associated with three different sources of uncertainty in simulated climate data on the modelling of mean crop yield and year-to-year crop yield variability.