NASA climate research scientist winner of World Food Prize
Rosenzweig spent most of career on global food production, climate change
A NASA climate research scientist who has spent much of her career explaining how global food production must adapt to a changing climate was awarded the World Food Prize on Thursday.
Cynthia Rosenzweig, an agronomist and climatologist, was awarded the $250,000 (U.S.) prize in recognition of her innovative modelling of the impact of climate change on food production.
She is a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and serves as adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University, both based in New York.
Rosenzweig, whose win was announced during a ceremony at the State Department in Washington, said she hopes it will focus attention on the need to improve food and agricultural systems to lessen the effects of climate change.
“We basically cannot solve climate change unless we address the issues of the greenhouse gas emissions from the food system, and we cannot provide food security for all unless we work really hard to develop resilient systems,” she told The Associated Press during an interview ahead of the ceremony.
Jose Fernandez, the U.S. undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment, said more than 160 million people worldwide experienced food insecurity last year, a 19 per cent increase over the year before, and one of the root causes is a decline in food production due to global warming.
“Climate change has already had a significant and negative impact on global agricultural production and its impact is only going to get worse. We’re seeing rice fields drown in floods. We’re seeing other crops wither in drought. We’re seeing shellfish die in more acidic oceans and crop diseases are spreading to new regions. We likely would not understand all these problems as well as we do today without the work of Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, this year’s World Food Prize laureate,” he said.
The Des Moines-based World Food Prize Foundation credited her work with directly helping decision-makers in more than 90 countries establish plans to prepare for climate change.
In her work, Rosenzweig has studied how farmers can deal with climate change and how agriculture worsens the problem.