Designing for Food Systems Resilience

Resilience + Circularity + Solidarity

The course in February was centered around how the concepts of a circularity and solidarity economy can build more resilient food systems. The global food system is comprised of a variety of food value chains – linear flows of resources associated with large volumes of waste, losses of nutrients and unequal shares of value and power. This wasteful model is resource- and energy-intensive while leaving billions of people unable to access a healthy diet.

Redesigning food value chains, using the concepts of both circularity and solidarity, has the potential to increase both the resilience and sustainability of food systems. Resilience, circularity, and solidarity are central elements of the concept of agroecology, which has been identified by the UN FAO as a holistic approach to facilitate transformative change towards not only sustainable agriculture but food systems as a whole.

Translating Research to Practice

The World Food System Center and its research groups have a wealth of expertise in exploring the potential of these agroecological elements to transform food systems. We at the Center, therefore, want to play a role in connecting practitioners working in the fields of agriculture, food and nutrition to the knowledge and methods that have emerged from research at ETH Zurich.

We were particularly interested to highlight how it is possible to use systemic and transdisciplinary approaches to transform waste into resources, close loops, create shared value and leverage interconnections to design interventions that build resilience. We aimed to give participants the chance to step back from silos, look at the big picture, understand connections, and explore how they could practically apply these concepts to their work.

Our Center together with one of our member groups, the Sustainable Agroecosystem group of Prof. Johan Six, have experience working with these transdisciplinary methods on projects spanning the globe. This course provided an opportunity to pool this expertise for the benefit of food system professionals.

An Online Experience

Given the current global situation, we decided to host the entire program online, which allowed participants join from all around the world to join without the need for anyone to fly. We had professionals in Latin America joining from early in the morning and participants from the Philippines staying with us until late in the night.

The program included short expert inputs to concepts of agroecology, circularity, solidarity, and resilience, but focused primarily having participants engage hands on with tools from transdisciplinary and systems thinking. They applied these tools to map the systems around a specific case study: tomato value chains in Morocco.

We found it a very positive experience to actively connect working professionals with tools, methods and insights emerging from research at ETH Zurich, and learned that this opportunity was greatly appreciated by the participants.

More Professional Courses to Come

We look forward to hosting more of these programs in the future. If you would like to find out when the next opportunity arises please sign up for the WFSC newsletter here: https://worldfoodsystem.ethz.ch/news/newsletter.html