Advancing Economics, Transforming Lives

September 2008

Global Collaboration to Begin Groundbreaking Research on Climate Change

By Adam Lovgren – Graduate Research Assistant

Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time. The extent of this disruption, both ecologically and economically, is uncertain.  To better understand how climate change acts as an agent of change in a natural system, MSU agricultural economists are taking part in a multidisciplinary collaboration of U.S. and international scientists with specialties in agricultural economics, climatology, computer science, economics, geography and horticulture.

The project uses tart cherry production as a prototype for developing a model for assessing the impact of climate change. It will also help determine appropriate methodologies to facilitate the interactions among all the disciplines involved.  For tart cherry growers, the biggest concern with climate change is the knockout combination of an early thaw combined with a late frost. Early thaws have become much more frequent in Michigan recently. 

The team of researchers is divided into three broad working groups. One group, made up of geographers, will focus on measuring climate change and projecting what climate might look like in the future. A group of horticultural scientists will examine what this projection of climate change will mean for tart cherry production. The third group, made up of agricultural economists, will develop techniques to model how climate change will shift markets, what climate change will mean for individual producers’ risk and how to manage that risk, and what will be the impacts and implications of climate change on regional characteristics in the few concentrated areas where tart cherries are produced around the globe.

Suzanne Thornsbury, MSU professor of agricultural economics, is a co-principal investigator who will oversee the economics team. Other MSU agricultural economists involved in the project are faculty members J. Roy Black and Scott Loveridge and graduate student Sanjun Lee. The remaining researchers come from other major geographic areas where tart cherries are produced in the United States, Poland, Germany, Hungary and Ukraine.  The Ukraine group includes MSU Department of Agricultural Economics alumnus Denys Nizalov, who is a faculty member at the Kyiv School of Economics. 

The project is funded by a National Science Foundation grant aimed at assembling a team of researchers and coordinating methodology to facilitate interaction among the disciplines. This project will not only provide valuable information to the tart cherry industry and regions that depend on it but will also lay the groundwork for future collaboration across disciplines and continents on the impact of climate change.