An integrated interdisciplinary modelling system of climate change impacts on agriculture in support of adaptation planning: MOSAICC

Session D8: Innovative, Participatory and Integrated Modelling for Climate Change Assessments and Management

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations developed a server-based integrated system of tools and models called MOSAICC to evaluate climate change impacts on the agriculture sectors (crops, water resources, forests, and economy). MOSAICC is designed to respond to the needs of developing countries which may benefit from institutional and individual capacity development in producing relevant information for national climate change adaptation planning. This innovative system design facilitates a participatory environment where researchers with different installations on the user's computer and makes maintenance and update of the system on the centralized server simple. MOSAICC is based on open-source technology and models thus it is transferrable to countries free-of-charge. The easy-to-use interface and data sharing/exchange through central database support interdisciplinary cooperation among local experts as the chain of simulations and data are transparent to users. Visualization and communication of the results in graphs and maps on the Web are integral parts of the system. The implementation strategy of MOSAICC in countries emphasizes stakeholder involvement in a technical working group throughout the study in order to produce information that is truly necessary in the country. National experts, who are members of the working group, design the study, perform simulations using MOSAICC, and publish the results to inform stakeholders. In the process, the experts learn the theory, methodology, and the use of models in a series of capacity development workshops.