Who we are
The Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use, and Energy (FABLE) Consortium is a collaborative initiative created in 2017. FABLE is a global network of researchers who develop national pathways that are consistent with global sustainability objectives, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement targets.
Our Vision
Our vision is collective science-based political action driving the pressing global challenges each of our countries is faced with. We believe that global collaboration between nations can be used to address global goals by recognizing each country’s autonomy, capacity, responsibility, and contribution. We create a collaborative space to support and challenge each other in support of evidence-based decision-making.
Country Teams
FABLE country teams are at the heart of FABLE's mission. Country teams develop national bottom-up pathways for sustainable food and land-use systems that describe the changes needed to achieve mid-century sustainability objectives. They also engage with national governments to promote ambitious sustainable policies.
FABLE Secretariat
The Secretariat is led by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (the Alliance). The Secretariat provides consortium members with modelling and policy engagement support.
Aline Mosnier
Scientific Director SDSN
Michael Obersteiner
Project Director IIASA
Valeria Javalera
Research Scholar IIASA
Fabrice DeClerck
Senior Scientist Alliance Bioversity International - CIAT
Sarah Jones
Scientist Alliance Bioversity International - CIAT
Fernando Orduña C.
Research Scholar IIASA
Lucie Adenauer
Senior Analyst SDSN
Maria Diaz
Manager SDSN
Clara Douzal
Statistician SDSN
Yiorgos Vittis
Research Scholar IIASA
Marcial Sandoval G.
Research ScholarIIASA
Former members of the FABLE Secretariat: Guido Schmidt-Traub (SDSN), Marine Formentini (SDSN), Jordan Poncet (SDSN), Camille François (SDSN), Micheline Khan (SDSN), Rudolf Neubauer (IIASA), Katya Pérez-Guzmán (IIASA/Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología of Mexico), Frank Sperling (IIASA), Marcus Thomson (IIASA), and Piero Visconti (IIASA).
Advisory Council
The FABLE Advisory Council brings together experts in food and land-use issues to the Consortium to provide critical thinking and strategic direction and oversight. The members are leaders in their fields, who bring together different perspectives, all aimed at moving forward FABLE's mission.
Namukolo Covic
International Livestock Research Institute
Federico Frank
National Agricultural Technology Institute
Line Gordon
Stockholm Resilience Centre
Thomas Hertel
Purdue University
Gordon McCord
UC San Diego
Vartika Singh
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
Hermann Lotze-Campen
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Former members of the Advisory Council: Alison Smith.
Technical Partners
The technical partners are the core modeling teams who share their models with Consortium members and provide support for their adaptation to the national context. Currently, these are the modeling teams from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) MAgPIE and IIASA GLOBIOM.
Global Biosphere Management Model (GLOBIOM)
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment (MAgPIE)
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Our Supporters
The FABLE Consortium is grateful for the generous financial support from many supporters, including the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF); Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation; the MAVA Foundation; Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI); the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida); the Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation (Svenska Postkod Stiftelsen); the World Resources Institute (WRI); and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología of Mexico. Many others have provided direct assistance to members of the FABLE country teams.
Aline Mosnier is the Scientific Director for the FABLE Consortium. She works with country teams to develop rigorous quantitative national pathways towards sustainable land use and food systems by 2050.
Prior to joining SDSN, Aline worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where she contributed to the development of the global partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM. In particular, her work focused on international trade in agricultural products, indirect impacts of biofuel policies, climate change impacts on agriculture, and deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics. With teams from local research institutes, she has worked on the co-development of regional versions of GLOBIOM in the Congo Basin, Brazil and Indonesia. Finally, she has developed the FABLE calculator, a simplified country-Excel-based accounting tool on the food and land system.
Aline holds a PhD in Agricultural and Environment Economics from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences of Vienna and a master's in development economics from CERDI-Université d'Auvergne of Clermont-Ferrand.
Michael Obersteiner is the Director of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, and Project Director of the FABLE Consortium. His research experience stretches from biophysical modelling in the areas of ecosystems, forestry and agriculture to economics, finance, and integrated assessment.
Professor Obersteiner joins the institute from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), where he was the Director of the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program. His background includes the fields of global terrestrial ecosystems and economics, having completed graduate studies both in Austria (BOKU University and Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna) and abroad (Columbia University, New York and Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk).
Under his leadership several national and international organizations, including inter alia the European Commission, WWF, OECD, and other national and international institutions have received science-based policy advice using quantitative modelling techniques. He is author of over 250 scientific papers and is a highly cited researcher - ranking in the top 1% of citations in the Web of Science according to Clarivate research.
Fabrice DeClerck holds a joint appointment with Bioversity International and the EAT Foundation. He leads innovative and synthetic food systems research using systems-based approaches to set clear science targets for healthy and sustainable foods systems. Using global targets, he works closely with multiple networks to drive uncommon collaborations between disciplines (agriculture, environment, health) and domains (science, business, policy) for food systems transformations.
His research emphasizes the critical role those agricultural ecosystems play in supporting sustainable development goals, and the role of agricultural diversity both in underpinning healthy diets, as well as sustainability. This same research has demonstrated that while agriculture is the current driver of increasingly poor dietary health and environmental degradation globally, a systems-based approach working across domains and disciplines can transform agriculture into the primary driver of health and sustainability.
Fabrice has regularly contributed articles to peer-reviewed journals spanning environment, agriculture, and health. He is a contributing author to the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food reports, and both Africa and Global IPBES Assessments.
Lucie Adenauer is the Senior Analyst for the FABLE (Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-use, and Energy) Consortium. She joined the SDSN in 2022 and works on developing consistent global and national pathways towards sustainable land use and food systems by 2050.
Before joining SDSN, Lucie has been an Assistant Professor in Agriculture Economics at the University College Dublin, where she focused on environmental and economic impacts of mitigation and carbon sequestration policies on the Irish Agriculture and Food sector as well as on international trade. Lucie has 15 years of experience in research, including economic modelling and innovative research on Agroforestry, Vertical Farming and Foreign Direct Investment.
Lucie holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics and a Diplom in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Bonn. As an Erasmus student, she spent one year at the Imperial College of London studying Agribusiness Management. She lives with her family in Paris.
Maria Diaz is Manager of the FABLE Consortium, based at Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), in Paris. She supports the FABLE Secretariat coordinating the consortium's activities, supporting stakeholder engagement, fundraising, knowledge generation, and policy outreach.
Before joining SDSN, Maria worked at the International Chamber of Commerce as Project Manager for the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation. Maria was responsible of ensuring private sector engagement in the implementation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement. Previously, she worked at Emerging Ag., providing communications and public affairs services to agri-food businesses at the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). She also worked at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) focusing on private sector engagement in global governance on food and nutrition security.
Maria holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science from Central University of Venezuela and a Master's in International Development from Sciences Po Paris. Originally from Venezuela, she speaks Spanish, English, and French.
Clara Douzal works in the SDSN Secretariat and is based in Montpellier as a Statistician for the FABLE Consortium. Her role consists of processing and analyzing data for FABLE country teams and other regions of the world.
Prior to joining SDSN in 2019, Clara was a biostatistician for Pierre Fabre dermo-cosmetics.
Clara holds a Master of Science in Statistics and Econometrics and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from the Toulouse School of Economics.
Valeria Javalera holds a PhD (cum laude) in Automatic and Robotics from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia Spain, an MSc in Computer Science, and an Engineering degree in Computer Systems from the Technological Institute of Hermosillo, Mexico. Her research focuses on developing Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for multi-objective and multi-agent optimization problems where a Pareto optimum is needed.
As a researcher at IIASA's Ecosystems Services and Management program, she manages and develops the Linker platform. The Linker platform is a tool that links land-use models from more than 24 regions/countries participating in the FABLE Consortium. She coordinates the collaboration between the country teams to align their countries' land-use planning through sustainable international trade, to meet the SDGs.
Previously, she was a research assistant at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics where she developed algorithms based on ML to optimize distributed Large-Scale Systems. She was an associate professor at the Higher Technological Institute of Cajeme and has more than fifteen years of teaching experience at graduate and undergraduate level.
Sarah is a Scientist in the Multifunctional Landscapes team at the Alliance of BI-CIAT in Montpellier, France. She is part of the FABLE secretariat supporting country teams develop policy-responsive methodologies to integrate biodiversity conservation and sustainable agricultural production into national development plans.
Sarah’s research seeks to understand how to diversify farms and landscapes to produce nutritious food in an ecologically and socially sustainable way. Alongside FABLE, Sarah is part of the OneCGIAR Transformational Agroecology and NexusGains initiatives, and EU-funded Agroecology Transitions project. Through these projects she is working with partners in several countries (Burkina Faso, India, Kenya, Laos, Peru, Tunisia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe) to monitor the agronomic, ecologic, economic and social performance of farming practices and to identify effective mechanisms for scaling biodiversity-friendly, socially sustainable and climate-resilient agricultural production systems.
Sarah holds a PhD in Sustainable Agricultural Intensification from King’s College London and a Master’s in GIS and Remote Sensing from The University of Cambridge.
Fernando Orduña-Cabrera is a NOVEL and EM research group member in the ASA program at IIASA.
He studied computer science engineering and Master of Science in Computer Science at the National Technological Institute of México (NTI), and his Artificial Intelligence Ph.D. at the Polytechnic University of Catalunya. He was a titular professor at the NTI campus Cajeme for 15 years. He was the coordinator of the Advanced Research Center and a member of the postgrad council board. The General Direction University Education awarded him a researcher and teaching profile in México.
He has experience developing machine learning algorithms. He has recently collaborated in FABLE Secretariat, developing tools to manage, analyze, and improve the FABLE tools such as the Scenathon and Calculator. Also, a collaborator in developing the intelligent linker tool to harmonize commodities' trade in the FABLE Consortium. His research interest includes machine learning, clustering, and the development of decision support systems. The implementation of AI techniques to support decision-making.
Dr Yiorgos Vittis holds a PhD in Agricultural and Food Economics from the University of Reading, United Kingdom. His research is looking at increasing the resilience and capacity of agricultural production systems to respond to productivity and economic challenges.
As a research scholar in the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) program at IIASA, Dr Yiorgos Vittis is developing an integrated model of biophysical components and economic cost functions for agricultural production systems at a global scale. The aim of this model is to systematically assess the economic implications for the agricultural industry globally, under changing spatial and trade patterns of food production and ongoing efforts to increase the sustainability of the agricultural sector.
Since completing his PhD, his work has included post-doctoral research in the Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) project in the University of Oxford where he developed a spatially explicit agricultural cost accounting model. Also, Yiorgos has worked together with veterinarian researchers from the University of Nottingham, within the 'Sheep Performance Improvement through Lameness monitoring and management' (SPILaMM) project, in developing a spatially explicit method assessing biophysical factors driving livestock production performance.
Marcial Sandoval Gastelum holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in México and has over five years of experience working in the field of artificial intelligence. After completing his studies, he worked as research assistant focused on recognizing human actions using inertial data and computer vision techniques. Throughout his research experience, he has gained expertise in various deep learning architectures used in computer vision and natural language processing.
As a researcher in the Exploratory Modeling Of Human-Natural Systems (EM) group at IIASA, he collaborates on developing visualization tools and enhancements to the SmartLinker, a machine learning algorithm for commodities trading within the FABLE consortium. In addition, he also contributes to the Scenathon website as a fullstack developer.
Namukolo Covic is ILRI Director General's Representative to Ethiopia. From 2015 to 2021 she served as Senior Research Coordinator at IFPRI, for the CGIAR Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) and worked on projects in several countries, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia. She is recognized for her ability to link diverse stakeholders on interlinkages of research, policy and program processes. She has worked with the government of Ethiopia, the Ethiopian Public Health Institute, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Agriculture, and development agencies on different fronts of food systems and nutrition, including the development of food based dietary guidelines and their adaptation to pastoralist settings in Ethiopia; and the development of Ethiopia's food systems transformation pathway in response to Ethiopia's development needs and the United Nations Food Systems Summit process.
Federico Frank works at the Department of Environmental Management and Natural Resources in Argentina's National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA). He also teaches "Integrated Ecosystems Management" (both undergraduate and postgraduate courses) at La Pampa National University (UNLPam). His research contributions have focused on the effects of land use and agricultural activities on agroecosystems at different spatial and temporal scales, including ecosystem services provision, greenhouse gas emission, water use, and other environmental impacts of food production.
Line Gordon is the director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She conducts innovative research that combines work with small scale farmers in Africa, global models of land-use and rainfall interactions, and culinary innovators. She has previously served as deputy director, deputy science director and research theme leader at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She currently co-leads the food theme in the Wallenberg Foundation funded Stanford collaboration programmes on 'Natural capital, resilience and biosphere stewardship' and 'Fundamental research in biosphere-based sustainability science'. She is on the board of directors of the EAT Foundation. She was also one of the authors of the EAT-Lancet Commission, and on its Executive Editorial Team.
Thomas Hertel is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, where his research and teaching focus on international trade, food and environmental security. Dr. Hertel is a Fellow, and a Past-President, of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). He is also the founder and Executive Director of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) which now encompasses more than 15,000 researchers in 170 countries around the world. This Project maintains a global economic data base and an applied general equilibrium modeling framework which are documented in the book: Global Trade Analysis: Modeling and Applications. Professor Hertel is currently leading a project on Global to Local Analysis of Systems Sustainability (GLASS).
Gordon McCord directs the SDG Policy Initiative at GPS, which uses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for bringing together policymakers and researchers to inform evidence-based solutions for a sustainable future. He is a senior advisor to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and advises developing country governments on policies to meet the SDGs using data-driven approaches. He serves as associate dean of Student Affairs at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, as well as associate teaching professor of economics at UC San Diego. McCord is also director of the Certificate in Spatial Analysis program and director of Online Education at GPS. He is a research affiliate at UC San Diego's Policy Design and Evaluation Laboratory (PDEL), and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Global Effective Action (CEGA).
Vartika Singh is PhD candidate, Humboldt Universitat-zu Berlin (Germany) and Research Assistant, at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She worked as Senior Research Analyst in the Environment, Production and Technology Division of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), involved in the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia project. Prior to joining IFPRI, she worked as Research and Training Manager with Evidence for Policy Design (India) at Harvard University and IFMR LEAD where she worked with policymakers from the Ministry of Rural Development and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. She has also worked with EPoD India on the capacity building of senior administrators to use research evidence for smart policy design.
Hermann Lotze-Campen is an agricultural economist and Head of Research Department 2 "Climate Resilience" at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He is also a Professor of Sustainable Land Use and Climate Change at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Hermann has a Master's degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Kiel and the University of Reading (England). For his doctoral studies he stayed in Kiel, at the University of Minnesota (USA), and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics in 1998. In 2001 Hermann joined PIK, where he developed a global land use modelling framework for assessments of the interplay between climate impacts, global food and bioenergy demand, agricultural land and water use, trade, and the environment.