Fruit & Vegetable Modeling Workshop

Fruits and vegetables play an essential role in nutritious diets, but the medium and long-term prospects for continued increases in production may be threatened by the combination of ongoing climate change, loss of freshwater availability, and competition for other resources. While there have been a growing number of model-based assessments looking at climate change impacts on staple crops, there have been relatively few studies on fruits and vegetables. There is a need to fill that void using a novel integrated modeling approach to characterize future availability and price of representative fruits and vegetables in key geographies. On 30-31 July 2015, the Agriculture & Food Systems Institute’s Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture & Nutrition Security (CIMSANS), UC Davis’ World Food Center, the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, and the Southeast Climate Consortium held a workshop at UC Davis. Twenty-one participants from public and private sector organizations shared a range of perspectives and experiences on what is needed for a model-based sustainability assessment of future domestic production, availability, and price for representative fruits and vegetables.

The workshop focused on four main points:

• Prioritization of fruit and vegetable crops for the assessment
• Global and domestic modeling approaches and challenges
• Technical resource requirements for conducting the work
• Achievable timing for such an assessment