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Resilience of food
systems
Helen Ross
Professor, Rural Development
School of Agriculture and Food
Sciences
Food Systems Workshop Wednesday 6th April 2016
Outline
Why does resilience matter
Ways of considering resilience
Some angles on food systems and resilience
research
Why does resilience matter?
• ???
• Our world – and particularly complex systems –
does not behave in predictable linear ways
• It is not enough to have a good working system,
it must be able to withstand shocks and
surprises
• A system that has had successive shocks loses
resilience, and can lose its functions over time
(disturbed by smaller shocks)
Sustainability and resilience
• Resilience thinking enhances (does not replace) sustainability
• Sustainability is about staying within the limits of the earth’s resources, using them in a way that leaves sufficient for future generations, and distributes them fairly (around the world, rich and poor) in a current generation.
• Resilience translates sustainability for a complex and uncertain world – complexity theory (see Levin 1998, Norberg & Cumming 2008)
- the world does not change according to linear trends, but according to far more complex patterns (with ‘tipping points’).
- the idea of ‘complex adaptive systems’
Many bodies of resilience theory
Social-ecological systems
(complex and adaptive,
multi-level)
Psychology-mental health
(strengths-based,
individuals, now
communities)
Disaster--management(engineering resilience +
household roles + responsibility
sharing)
Image: http://sportsnutritioninsider.insidefitnessmag.com/5050/an-ode-to-nutrient-timing
Engineering
resilience
Business
resilience
Some key points
• Relates to ability to withstand, cope with (even grow
through) disturbances
• Complex adaptive systems thinking
• Coupling of social and ecological
• Multi-level systems – interacting levels
• Generalised and specified resilience (of something, to something)
• Focus on strengths
• Resilience as a process
• Resilience is not converse of vulnerability
• Adaptive cycles theory
• Control is not possible, agency and adaptation is
e.g. Community resilience model(Berkes and Ross, Society and Natural Resources, 2013)
Berkes and Ross (2013), building on Ross et al. (2010) and Buikstra et al. (2010)
Think of the strengths as being adaptive capacities.
At community level, agency and self-organising convert the capacities into a resilience process
Research options (general)Ross & Berkes, Society and Natural Resources (2014)
• Understand resilience processes (in a
context)
• Understand and build (e.g. participatory
planning, action research, community
development)
• Monitoring and indicators
Management options
For managers:
1. Know (acknowledge) resilience
– Pursue existing mandates in consciousness of social-ecological characteristics, without
trying to intervene
2. Use it
– Take advantage of resilience characteristics in management strategies
3. Grow it
– Pursue organisational mandates in a new way that enhances resilience
For communities:Community development (capacity building) approaches
build the strengths
support for self-organising
Community-based planning
local knowledge and ownership towards relevant plans
Toolkit approach
Resilience and food systems (1)
Ideas:Food security as a resilience issue, better ways of organising
supply and shocks (e.g. disaster interruptions)
role of nutrition in individual and community resilience
Resilience in food-energy-water nexus complex systems (Zimmerman et al. 2016)
Multi-level organising in food systems (local to global)
Food as a vector in One Health (local - global)
SE Asia circular economy project – more plastics than fish in the ocean
Food growing/production systems for resilient ecosystems and society;
climate resilience for food systems
Resilience and farming systems (especially for poor/vulnerable)
Not just about resilience of the food system.
Think about resilience where food interacts in wider systems e.g. population
growth-food-biodiversity
Methods
• Systems thinking, analysis
• Mixed methods
• Case studies
– Including economic analyses
• Participatory methods (e.g. Part action
research)
• Multi-party collaborative, with partners,
communities
Funders
• Governments, e.g. for disaster area,
biosecurity
• ACIAR?
• World bank e.g. circular economy project
Some titles in literature
• Future water availability for global food production: the potential of green water
for increasing resilience to global change
• Effects of nutrient recycling and food-chain length on resilience
• Land use alters the resistance and resilience of soil food webs to drought
• … crop-drought vulnerability: an empirical analysis of the socio-economic
factors that influence the sensitivity and resilience to drought of three major
food crops in China …
• Community resilience and contemporary agri‐ecological systems: reconnecting
people and food, and people with people
• Urban gardens, agriculture, and water management: sources of resilience for
long-term food security in cities
• Food security in complex emergencies: enhancing food system resilience
• Resilience of soil biota in various food webs to freezing perturbations
• Travelling in antique lands: using past famines to develop an
adaptability/resilience framework to identify food systems vulnerable to climate
change
References
• Berkes F and Ross H 2013, Community resilience: Toward an integrated approach, Society and Natural Resources, 26:1, 5-20
• Ross H and Berkes F 2014, online first, Research approaches for understanding, enhancing and monitoring community resilience, Society and Natural Resources, 27: 8, 787-804.
• Zimmerman R, Zhu Quanyan and Dimitri C 2016, Journal of Environmental Studies and Science, 6: 50-61.