NASA climatologist Cynthia Rosenzweig, one of the first scientists to document the impact of climate change on food production, is this year’s winner of the $250,000 World Food Prize, said the Food Prize foundation on Thursday. “Dr. Rosenzweig has brought powerful computational tools into practical application in agriculture and food systems,” said foundation president Barbara Stinson during an announcement ceremony at the State Department.
Beginning in the 1980s, Rosenzweig was a pioneer in developing methodologies for measuring and predicting the effects of climate change and the information used by dozens of countries to mitigate and adapt to global warming, said the foundation. In 2008, she founded the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), a global network of experts dedicated to honing the models used to predict agricultural performance in a changing climate.
“Climate change cannot be restrained without attention to food system emissions, and food security for all cannot be provided without resilience to increasing climate extremes,” said Rosenzweig, 73, at the announcement ceremony. “As we move into a crucial decade of action on climate change, food needs to be ‘at the table.’ ”
Rosenzweig’s early work, in the 1980s, “was an important methodological breakthrough in the beginning of climate change impact assessment and established the foundations for current work in this field,” said the World Food Prize Foundation. “Rosenzweig is an innovator in modeling science, leading vital studies that have shaped the global debate on climate change and agriculture.”
The World Food Prize was created in 1986, fulfilling the vision of 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug of an award honoring significant contributions to improving the world food supply. Borlaug was the father of the “Green Revolution” of high-yielding grains that alleviated world hunger. Because of its ties to Borlaug, a Nobel laureate, the World Food Prize has been called the Nobel Prize of Agriculture.
Born in the New York City suburb of Scarsdale, Rosenzweig developed a lifelong interest in agriculture when she and her husband started a farm in Tuscany, Italy. When they returned to New York in 1972, she earned a two-year degree in agriculture from a Long Island technical college, then went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture from Rutgers and a doctorate in plant, soil, and environmental sciences from the University of Massachusetts.
In 1985, Rosenzweig published her first journal article on modeling the potential impacts of climate change on wheat-growing regions of North America and how the wheat belt might shift due to global warming. In 1988, she led the agriculture sector’s work in the first EPA assessment of how climate change might affect the United States. And she was a coauthor in 1994 of the first study to assess the potential impact of climate change on the global food supply.
“The results of this study made it very clear that low- and middle-income countries would bear the brunt of climate change and suffer disproportionate effects,” said the Food Prize foundation.
Rosenzweig is a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia Climate School. NASA administrator Bill Nelson joined Secretary of State Antony Blinken in attending the announcement.
The World Food Prize will be awarded formally to Rosenzweig during the World Food Prize symposium, to be held Oct. 18-20 in Des Moines, Iowa.
A video of the award announcement is available here.
To read a biography of Rosenzweig, click here.