Climate change and agriculture

Dr. Delphine Deryng is a Climate Policy Analyst at the New Climate Institute based in Berlin, Germany since May 2020, focusing primarily on global climate actions in the agriculture and forestry sector. Dr. Deryng is also a Guest Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt-University of Berlin, and an author to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group II: Chapter 5 "Food, fibre, and other ecosystem products" (Lead Author) and Chapter 9 "Africa" (Contributing Author). She has written widely on climate change impacts and adaptation in the agriculture sector and possesses extensive experience in the development and use of global gridded crop modelling tools for global climate impacts assessments. She is the main developer of the global agroecosystem model PEGASUS since 2007 and coordinated the first global gridded crop model intercomparison initiative during 2012-2015, as part of the Agricultural Modelling Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), which led to significant advances in the quantification of climate change impacts on global crop yields. Dr. Deryng holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia (2015), an MSc. in Geography from McGill University (2010) and an MSc. in Cosmology and High Energy Physics from University Paris Diderot (2006).

Dr Kenneth Boote is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Agronomy at the University of Florida, USA. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in crop modelling, helping to develop the DSSAT software application program that simulates growth for over 40 different crops. He is presently serving as Co-Lead for Crop Modeling in AgMIP, the global Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project. Amongst his many distinctions, Professor Boote is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Crop Science Society of America and the American Society of Agronomy.

Cheikh Mbow is a research Professor and the Director of Future Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Michigan State University’s Department of Forestry. Over the past 23 years, Mbow has been active to raise funding and develop research and education partnerships. He established and coordinated the GOFC-GOLD Regional Network for West Africa (WARN) and worked in several regional programs such as AFRICANESS, AMMA (FP6), UNDESERT (FP7) projects, for the Global Atlas of the convention on Desertification, the GBO3 and for the GLO. Cheikh Mbow has been a Senior Scientist (Team Leader) on Climate Change and Development at World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and supported the inter-institutional program CCAFS (Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security). He is a Lead Author on the Agriculture, Forestry and, Other Land Use (AFOLU) chapter in the IPCC's AR-5 and AR-6. Mbow is now a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Special Report on Food Security.