Modeling Sustainable Food Systems

Abstract

The processes underlying environmental, economic, and social unsustainability derive in part from the food system. Building sustainable food systems has become a predominating endeavor aiming to redirect our food systems and policies towards better-adjusted goals and improved societal welfare. Food systems are complex social-ecological systems involving multiple interactions between human and natural components. Policy needs to encourage public perception of humanity and nature as interdependent and interacting. The systemic nature of these interdependencies and interactions calls for systems approaches and integrated assessment tools. Identifying and modeling the intrinsic properties of the food system that will ensure its essential outcomes are maintained or enhanced over time and across generations, will help organizations and governmental institutions to track progress towards sustainability, and set policies that encourage positive transformations. This paper proposes a conceptual model that articulates crucial vulnerability and resilience factors to global environmental and socio-economic changes, postulating specific food and nutrition security issues as priority outcomes of food systems. By acknowledging the systemic nature of sustainability, this approach allows consideration of causal factor dynamics. In a stepwise approach, a logical application is schematized for three Mediterranean countries, namely Spain, France, and Italy.

Adequação normativa dos planos estaduais de segurança alimentar e nutricional no Brasil

“…Percebe-se que em países onde a fome e a miséria caracterizam-se como principal problema, o conceito e as políticas de segurança alimentar e nutricional estão mais associados à dimensão do acesso a quantidades suficientes de alimentos 9,10,11,12 . Nos países onde a fome foi superada, o conceito e as políticas são direcionados para os aspectos qualitativos da alimentação 13,14,15,16,17 . Já em países em transição epidemiológica, como o Brasil, assumem-se conceitos e políticas que envolvem ambas as dimensões 2,18,19,20 .…”

Food System Sustainability across Scales: A Proposed Local-To-Global Approach to Community Planning and Assessment

“…This was a strong indication that, like the challenges and tradeoffs to modelling food systems discussed by Prosperi and Allen [20], there is no perfect set of predefined indicators; in particular at the local level. They will need to be developed, refined, and adapted in such a way that they are helpful in managing decision making in complex and changing environments.…”

“…The model clearly links sustainability challenges, through food systems, to human food security outcomes. Allen and Prosperi build on Ingram's work, to model and measure food system sustainability [20], making significant progress in the effort to define clearly what is more, or less, sustainable, by positioning vulnerability/resilience indicators between drivers of change and food system outcomes as the predictor of full system (of interest) sustainability. This focus on vulnerability and resilience indicators adds a critical understanding of how drivers relate to resiliency outcomes (and, thus, to sustainability).…”

“…A growing body of research seeks to measure sustainable food systems with publicly available data [13,[20][21][22][23]. These lend strength to much needed cross-sectoral, national, and global policy prioritization.…”

Introducing a dynamic framework to jointly address policy impacts on environmental and human health in a regional produce recovery and redistribution system

“…Although dynamic models of food systems (Allen & Prosperi, 2016;Muetzelfeldt, 2010) have been created and employed, to the best of FIGURE 1 Simplified model of surplus produce recovery and redistribution our knowledge, there are no published dynamic models of the produce recovery system. Stakeholder-engaged dynamic modeling can contribute insights about the potential and actual effectiveness of and barriers to implementing food recovery policies in a region.…”