I Am Not a Pessimistic Person

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig will receive the 2022 World Food Prize for her seminal contributions to understanding and predicting the impacts of the interaction between climate and food systems.  She has spent the last four decades increasing our understanding of climate change and food systems and how they impact food security globally. 

An agronomist and climatologist, she has been a leader in the fields of food and climate since 1985, when she published her first journal article on modeling the potential impacts of climate change on wheat-producing regions of North America. She has shaped our current understanding of the tight relationship between food security and climate change. The quantitative data to confirm that severe weather volatility threatens our ability to feed and nourish humanity.  This impacts political stability, mitigation and requires strategies both curb climate change and enhance sustainable farming.

Global climate change is the most important challenge that we face as a human race. It is a major impetus to move the planet toward sustainability. But I am not a pessimist

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig

Rosenzweig realized early on that climate change is one of the most significant, pervasive and complex challenges currently facing the planet’s food systems. She became was one of the first scientists to document that climate change was already impacting our food supply. She is best known for AgMiPs, the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, a global, transdisciplinary network of 1,000+ researchers in climate and food systems modeling.

Although she is now a Senior Research Scientist and head of the Climate Impacts Group at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, she started as a farmer. Her research centers on helping farmers to plan for climate change.