Chapters authored
Global Food System Transformation for Resilience
Our world is incredibly diverse and beautiful, everything we do has an impact on the environment, and our actions are intertwined. Recognizing how our actions affect the Earth on a global scale means, we need to change the way we do things. We must ensure that the value society derives from our actions comes at a low cost to the environment. A sustainable strategy to establish a resilient food system is to ensure that human demand for the Earth’s resources for food is kept within the supply of these resources. While more than 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition, our food systems emit roughly a third of all greenhouse emissions. Also, over 80% of our biodiversity gets lost. Hence, scaling up food system is simply not an option to feed nine to ten billion people by 2050 as we will need to produce more food in the next four decades than all of history’s farmers have harvested in the last eight thousand years. Therefore, rather than upscaling, the global food systems require transformation. Four critical aspects of this transformation include: “Boosting the small; Transforming the Big; Losing Less; and Eating Smarter.” Examining these four areas more deeply, it becomes evident that, while new technology will be critical to the transformation, government involvement, as well as better financial and behavioral change from residents and consumers, will be required. This chapter focuses on these four pillars that make up the global food system transformation for resilience.
Part of the book: Food Systems Resilience