Food Resilience



Food Resilience

Symposium on American Food Resilience: Promoting a Secure Food Supply

The resilience of the American food supply—the ability of the food system to withstand shocks or stresses that could lead to disruption or collapse—is a matter of genuine concern. While all seems well with supermarkets stocked to the brim, changes in the food system and our environment during recent decades have created risks that are no longer hypothetical possibilities. They are with us now. It’s difficult to get a clear grip on this topic because the food system is so complex, and failure could take forms never seen before. It’s easy for wishful thinking to prevail, but the stakes are high.

In 2013, an informal working group in the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) began to address this issue with ten presentations on food resilience at the AESS annual conference. View a complete record of the presentations and discussion.

In 2015, the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences published the Symposium on American Food Resilience: Part 1 in September 2015 and Part 2 in December 2015. The 27 articles in the Symposium explore the vulnerability and resilience of food production and distribution from a variety of perspectives, providing a wealth of material that can be mined by researchers, teachers, practitioners, and policy makers for application to their own circumstances.

  • What are the main lines of vulnerability in the food system?
  • What are leverage points for reducing the risks and improving the capacity to cope with breakdowns?
  • What is already being done by government, civil society, and the private sector to reduce the risks?
  • What can scientists, teachers, and other professionals do through research, education, community action, or other means to make the food system more resilient?

Download a detailed overview of the Symposium
View abstracts of all the articles

The list of titles below provides links to free downloads of the final manuscripts for all the articles. An inexpensive way to have complete access to the published versions of all the articles, including free downloads, is to become an AESS member.

Titles of the articles in the Symposium on American Food Resilience:

Click on a title to view the entire final manuscript (free download)

  1. Introduction to the Symposium on American Food Resilience
  2. A System Dynamics Approach for Examining Mechanisms and Pathways of Food Supply Vulnerability
  3. How Resilient Is the United States Food System to Pandemics?
  4. The Vulnerability of the U.S. Food System to Climate Change
  5. The 2014 Drought and Water Management Policy Impacts on California’s Central Valley Food Production
  6. Connecting Resilience, Food Security and Climate Change: Lessons from Flooding in Queensland, Australia
  7. “Plant a Victory Garden: Our Food is Fighting”: Lessons of Food Resilience from World War
  8. From Chernobyl to Fukushima: an Interdisciplinary Framework for Managing and Communicating Food Security Risks after Nuclear Plant Accidents
  9. Resilience in a Concentrated and Consolidated Food System
  10. Civil Society, Corporate Power, and Food Security: Counter-Revolutionary Efforts that Limit Social Change
  11. Food Stocks and Grain Reserves: Evaluating whether Storing Food Creates Resilient Food Systems
  12. Resilience and the Industrial Food System: Analyzing the Impacts of Agricultural Industrialization on Food System Vulnerability
  13. Adapting a Social-Ecological Resilience Framework for Food Systems
  14. Introduction to the Symposium on American Food Resilience (Part 2)
  15. The Role of Knowledge in Building Food Security Resilience across Food System Domains
  16. From Industrial Production to Biosensitivity: The Need for a Food System Paradigm Shift
  17. Metropolitan Foodsheds: A Resilient Response to the Climate Change Challenge?
  18. Promoting Resilience in a Regional Seafood System: New England and the Fish Locally Collaborative
  19. Toward Resilient Food Systems through Increased Agricultural Diversity and Local Sourcing
  20. Agroecosystem Health, Agroecosystem Resilience, and Food Security
  21. Seed Exchange Networks and Food System Resilience in the United States
  22. Regionalism: A New England Recipe for a Resilient Food System
  23. The Local Food Movement, Public-Private Partnerships, and Food System Resiliency
  24. The Power of Story for Adaptive Response: Marshaling Individual and Collective Initiative to Create More Resilient and Sustainable Food Systems
  25. Do global Food Systems Have an Achilles Heel? The Potential for Regional Food Systems to Support Resilience in Regional Disasters
  26. Can Urban Agriculture Usefully Improve Food Resilience? Insights from a Linear Programming Approach
  27. Modelling Food System Resilience: A Scenario-Based Simulation Modelling Approach to Explore Future Shocks and Adaptations in the Australian Food System

Click on a title to view the entire final manuscript (free download)

 



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