IFPRI’s climate change work focuses on developing countries and poor farmers. Agriculture accounts for 14% of greenhouse gas emissions, excluding those impacts coming from land-use change, and developing countries contribute the majority of these emissions*. Below are some key terms used in IFPRI’s research.

Adaptation: Changes in practices, both short and long-term, that take into account the impacts of climate change. Adaptation measures for agriculture could include infrastructure investment (i.e. water storage), adopting more resilient crop varieties (with tolerance to drought or submergence), and altered land use or land management practices.

Afforestation: The process of establishing a forest on land that is not currently under forest cover, or has not been a forest for a long time, by planting trees or their seeds.

Bioenergy: The use of biomass resources to produce an array of energy-related products, including fuel and electricity.

Biomass: Any plant-derived organic matter.

Carbon fertilization: The effect of additional amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on increasing plant growth.

Carbon sequestration: The process by which carbon sinks remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. This can be done naturally by plants, or artificially, for instance, by removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plant emissions.

Carbon sink: A reservoir of carbon—not in a greenhouse gas—that can remove carbon from another part of the carbon cycle and store it for an indefinite period. Plants use photosynthesis to remove carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and incorporate it into biomass carbon sinks above and below ground.

Clean Development Mechanism: An arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol allowing industrialized countries with a greenhouse gas reduction commitment to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries as an alternative to more expensive emission reductions in their own countries.

Deforestation: The conversion of forested areas to non-forest land for uses such as crops, pasture, or urban use. Deforestation releases carbon stored in trees and soil back into the atmosphere, leads to soil erosion, and alters the water cycle.

Desertification: The degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting primarily from human activities and influenced by variations in climate.

Drought-resistant crops: Crops that grow well in dry conditions, either naturally or as a result of seed modification, developed through both conventional and modern genetic engineering methods.

Ecosystem: A dynamic complex of plant, animal, and microorganism communities and the nonliving environment interacting as a functional unit.

Ecosystem services: The benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include providing services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; providing cultural services with recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling.

Environmental services: Ecosystem services that do not pass through a market.

Global Warming Potential (GWP): The number of units of CO2 emissions that would have the same effect as a unit of emission of another greenhouse gas (in terms of mass). For example, the release of one kilogram (kg) of methane would result in an effect similar to 25 kg of CO2, so the GWP for methane is 25.

GCM: A General Circulation Model is one of a class of computer-driven models for forecasting weather, understanding climate, and projecting climate change. Also known as Global Climate Models.

Hydrology: The study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water throughout the Earth, addressing both the hydrologic cycle and water resources. Climate change can impact both the movement of water around the globe and the quantity and quality of water available.

Kyoto Protocol: A protocol to the international Framework Convention on Climate Change, it aims to reduce greenhouse gases in an effort to prevent human-induced climate change. The treaty entered into force in February 2005, and as of October 2008, 182 countries had ratified the Protocol. View latest list of countries and their status of ratification (PDF 185K)

Land degradation: Human-induced processes acting upon the land that reduce its value, health, and productivity. Causes include deforestation, agricultural depletion of soil nutrients, overgrazing, and irrigation. The impacts, including desertification, can be intensified by climate change.

Land use: Human modification of the earth’s land surface.

Mitigation: Actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration.

Payment for environmental services: Payments given to natural resource users for providing environmental services.

REDD: “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.” In the negotiations for the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, funding and implementation mechanisms for REDD are a key goal of many developing countries.

Reforestation: The restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted.

Scenario: A forward-looking description of events and a series of possible actions that can be used in policy-oriented research. IFPRI uses a variety of demographic, economic, and environmental futures models to form part of the scenario-building process to understand how food prices and other welfare outcomes might evolve under climate change.

SRES: The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios was first issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2000. The SRES scenarios were constructed to explore future developments in the global environment with special reference to the production of greenhouse gases and aerosol precursor emissions.

Sustainable land management: Land-use practices that ensure land, water, and vegetation adequately support land-based production systems for current and future generations.

UNFCCC: The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change sets an overall agenda for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenge posed by climate change. 192 countries have ratified it, and the UNFCCC is currently working toward a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

World Resources Institute 2007; World Development Report 2008. [Back]