A more resilient food system is one that fosters creative innovation and empowers local communities, panelists said during “Building Resilient Food Systems For All,” a Climate Week NYC Summit held in partnership with the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph. And resilience isn’t one-and-done—the term describes the active progress we need to be making to reach our end goals of a more climate-smart, nourishing food system.
“Food systems transformation is not requiring us to fly up to Mars and build a new food system,” says Evan Fraser, Professor and Director of the Arrell Food Institute. “It’s pedestrian, normal, everyday things that will affect food system transformation.”
At the heart of resilience is diversification—the old adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket. As climate change increases the severity and unpredictability of risks like natural disasters, doing ‘more of the same’ will only make us more vulnerable.
“Whether you are in banking or in farming or in eating, diversify your portfolio,” says Philip Teverow, Co-Founder of Yolele.
As Shakuntala Thilsted, the Director of the Nutrition, Health and Food Security Impact Area Platform at CGIAR, says, when it comes to our priorities in approaching food and climate in a more resilient way, “we have to make sure we’re bringing new people on board and new ways of looking at these issues.”
This means not only inviting women, young people, farmers in the Global South, and more to take a seat at the table, but also empowering them to build solutions that respond to their communities. We’re past the awareness-building stage, panelists said; now it’s time to make sure that optimistic, passionate community leaders have the resources they need to turn their knowledge into action.
“We’ve done our research and we’re still ambitious anyway,” says Gareth Gransaull, Co-Executive Director of Re-Generation. “We have these bold ideas about the future, and it’s not for lack of understanding.”
To actually achieve these solutions—and to ensure ‘resilience’ remains meaningful and does not become a buzzword—measurement is key, panelists said. Research and data collection programs must also engage with a variety of communities and geographic areas.
“You have to track everything from your head office to a head lettuce in the field,” says Julia Collins, Founder of Planet FWD.
“A lot of companies want to improve sustainability metrics and improve nutrition, but it’s really hard to make those changes without actionable data,” says Riana Lynn, Founder of Journey Foods. “A lot of Global South data is missing when it comes to sustainability metrics.”
Quantitative information is vital to making the case for resilient practices more strongly and persuasively, but we also need better stories to contextualize these numbers, said panelists including Collins and Merijn Dols, Managing Partner of the Future Economy Forum.
“Data alone don’t change society,” Collins says. “It’s the way we wrap data into credible stories that really moves the needle.”
There’s no question technology will continue to play a major role in the future of food systems, and indeed, tech solutions including artificial intelligence can be useful tools for measuring sustainability and scaling solutions, panelists said. In fact, we may not even be able to imagine today what technologies might be available to us in the near future.
But technology, like any single solution, is no silver bullet. We have to be open-minded about technology, panelists said, but at the same time, we cannot forget that at the heart of any resilient food system are people.
“There are so many systems we were using even two years ago that are so much better today,” Lynn says. “We have to imagine that, in the next five to 10 years, there’s going to be smarter solutions than ever—so we have to be creative about how we think about it and who is leading those efforts.”
“What gives me hope isn’t just the technology, but the technology plus the governance and the participation and the transparency,” Fraser says.
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Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.
