Enhancing Resilience in Food Systems

Food systems must provide sufficient, adequate and accessible food for all, in a sustainable way.

• Food systems are increasingly exposed to drivers of change, ranging from sudden shocks to long-term stressors, such as natural disasters, pest outbreaks, economic and political crises, climate change, and resource degradation. Many of these drivers of change are hard to predict, and therefore hard to manage. 
• Food systems are intrinsically complex: they comprise many different processes, value chains, actors and interactions; their outcomes affect multiple stakeholders and sectors in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways. Thus food systems themselves, and their outcomes, are also hard to predict and to manage.

With so much uncertainty and complexity, how can we make food systems more sustainable under multiple, unpredictable drivers of change?