Food system vulnerability: Using past famines to help understand how food systems may adapt to climate change
Section snippets
Introduction: vulnerability to climate change within food systems
To survive, many of us – especially those in wealthier parts of the world – depend on a web of food producers, distributors, processors and retailers who work together to move food from farm to plate. This extremely complex system has profound implications on the type of society we live in and the impact we have on the environment (Friedland et al., 1981, Friedland, 1994, Connor and Schiek, 1997). On the surface, today's food system is amazing: for remarkably little money, many affluent
Literature: theories on vulnerability
At the heart of identifying food systems that are “robust” versus those that are “vulnerable” is the need to identify situations where relatively small changes in climate (such as minor drought) may cause a large or significant impact on human well being. Some scholars have approached this task from a quantitative modelling perspective, and link climate prediction scenarios with crop productivity curves. These models often result in maps that show the impact of future weather conditions, such
Analysis: some common threats of past famines
The first feature that stands out as common in these various situations is that over time, each region increasingly depended on fragile and specialized agricultural systems. For example, over the period leading to the Irish Famine, a combination of population growth and declining opportunities for off-farm employment meant that the Irish peasants was forced to maximize crop productivity just to survive. As potatoes produce approximately twice the calories of corn (per hectare) and grow on
Discussion: developing a framework to identify vulnerability
From this, we can conclude that a framework to identify vulnerability to climate change within food systems must include data on four scales. First, we need to collect data on the characteristics of the agro-ecosystem. This would involve understanding things like crop diversity, moisture requirements, soil organic matter, and the arrangement of fields across the landscape. The tools of landscape ecology are key here. Second, it is necessary to assess whether or not there are viable farm
Conclusion: the next steps
Environmental threats to the food system have been a common feature of many civilizations, and history is littered with examples of groups who failed to adapt when problems arose. This includes the Vikings who farmed Greenland (Anon., 1970) during a warm spell but were not able to adapt to colder conditions and the Maya who seemed to have evacuated their cities after periods of drought (Haug et al., 2003). As we face towards a future many think will be full of environmental surprises, and in a
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the continued support and encouragement by David Abson, John Atibila, Andy Dougill, Alexander Fomin, Klaus Hubacek, and Mark Reed in this project. Funding for this project has been provided by The Simons Foundation and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. I am extremely grateful for the comments of the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for their time and critiques of this manuscript.
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