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Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation—the three “Rs”). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors’ perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 47 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19 is explored using a social-ecological systems (SES) framework. From an SES perspective, the pandemic is the outcome of feedback loops and cascading interactions within an anthropologically disturbed system. However, the SES framework tends to overemphasize human agency as drivers of system disequilibrium. Drawing on posthumanism theory in social science, the agency of the non-human world also plays a critical role in disturbances in SES. Non-human agency is incorporated into the SES framework, applying it to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the spread of COVID-19, and public health responses. The paper is interdisciplinary, and a non-systematic literature review was combined with Socratic dialogue to examine how human-induced changes trigger feedbacks in SES, such as SARS-CoV-2. The non-human world, embedded within a coupled system of material relations; the natural/biological element, that finds expression in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and in generating the genome novel recombinant, which aligns with the conceptualization of the non-human as “vibrant”, all play a role in shaping systems dynamics. This calls into question the anthropocentric view that human agency has the capacity to drive ecosystem dynamics. The implications for SES theory are discussed and we conclude with a case for a new ethics of interdependency to better serve SES analysis. The implications for practice, particularly considering projected future novel virus outbreaks, are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted weaknesses in global food systems, as well as opening windows of opportunity for innovation and transformation. While the nature and extent of this crisis is rare, extreme climatic events will increase in magnitude and frequency, threatening similar societal impacts. It is therefore critical to identify mechanisms for developing food systems that are resilient to such impacts. We examine impacts of the crisis on UK food systems and how these further entrenched social inequalities. We present data on the experiences and actions of producers, consumers, and community organisers. The data were collected by adapting ongoing research to include surveys, interviews and online workshops focused on the pandemic. Actors’ responses to the pandemic foreshadow how enduring change to food systems can be achieved. We identify support required to enable these transformations and argue that it is vital that these opportunities are embedded in food justice principles which promote people-centred approaches to avoid exacerbating injustices prevalent pre-crisis. Learning from these experiences therefore provides insights for how to make food systems elsewhere more resilient and just.

Ecosystem resilience is increasingly considered within political responses to environmental problems and is a key element of recent environmental legislation in Wales. The actual mechanisms of ecosystem resilience are complex making it difficult, from a management perspective, to meaningfully describe or report on them for ecosystems at a national scale. For this reason, the legislation and associated policies in Wales have taken a pragmatic approach, using environmental attributes that have previously been causally linked with ecosystem resilience as a framework for description and reporting. These attributes are diversity, extent, condition, connectivity and adaptability, and referred to as ‘DECCA’. The framework has proved useful and influential, and provides a novel example of how established and relatively simple scientific principles can inform and put into practice legislation about complex environmental systems; the Welsh case serves as the first example of a national government implementing resilience policy. However, the attributes remain proxies for actual resilience and knowledge gaps for converting theory to practice remain. These include fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms of resilience and related concepts such as environmental tipping points, and methodological issues such as how resilience can be quantified and confidently reported on. There is a need to develop a research framework for addressing these issues, linked to policy cycles to ensure new evidence and understanding are appropriately interpreted and adopted.

Background Diets in high-income countries such as the UK are generally both unhealthy and unsustainable, contributing to climate change and an escalating prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Community supported agriculture schemes (CSAs) present a promising sustainable alternative to large-scale intensive monoculture farming. Our study aimed to explore this potential by investigating whether CSA members' diets are more environmentally sustainable, and of higher nutritional quality, than those of community controls. Methods This mixed methods study involved 113 participants drawn from four UK CSA schemes and the wider population. Adult male and female CSA participants were recruited through collaboration with four CSA organisations. Controls were recruited by approaching shoppers outside local supermarkets. Participants undertook semi-structured interviews exploring household food culture, food practices, and socioeconomic characteristics, and completed 3-day food diaries. Dietary quality was assessed by comparison with 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission dietary guidelines, and greenhouse gas emissions were used to indicate environmental sustainability. Intra-participant data were integrated by comparing responses through triangulation. Ethics approval was granted by Cardiff University, and participants provided written consent. Findings 46 participants were recruited to the CSA group and 67 to the control group. CSA members had higher mean annual household income (£35 254 [SD 11 269·04] vs £27 115 [10 135·97]) and were more likely to be vegan (six [13%] vs one [1%]) or vegetarian (three [7%] vs two [3%]) than controls. CSA members' dietary intake was associated with 28% reduction in mean greenhouse gas emissions compared with controls (2995 g [SD 2035] vs 3823 g [2501] of CO2 equivalent). CSA participants also consumed diets adhering more closely to EAT-Lancet dietary guidelines: CSA members consumed significantly fewer calories from meat (46 vs 121 kcal/day, p=0·029) and dairy (205 vs 284 kcal/day, p=0·065), and more from vegetables (93 vs 43 kcal/day, p=0·001) and legumes (42 vs 19 kcal/day, p=0·077), than did controls. Mean caloric intake did not differ between groups (CSA group 1655 kcal/day, control group 1737 kcal/day; p=0·56). Ten CSA participants (22%) reported eating more healthily since joining the scheme. Interpretation Our results indicate that policies widening participation in CSAs may present a small-scale opportunity to enhance the environmental sustainability and healthfulness of UK diets. Conclusions are limited by the observational study design, and potentially biased characteristics of CSA participants. Funding UK Research and Innovation (grant BBSRC Award BB/S014292/1).

In an effort to advance diversity in the geosciences, the Stanford InTeGrate Implementation Program (SIIP) increased the academic geosciences exposure of underrepresented minority undergraduates and increased career satisfaction and retention of Stanford School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Science (Stanford Earth) graduate and postdoctoral students. The program facilitated pedagogy training and geoscience teaching opportunities for Stanford Earth graduate and postdoctoral students in STEM disciplines at local 2-year colleges and minority serving collegiate institutes (2YC/MSI). This chapter provides details on how the program was implemented as well as outcomes with regard to undergraduate students, Stanford Earth graduate and postdoctoral students, and 2YC/MSI faculty mentors who partnered with SIIP. Finally, we highlight different program elements that were conducive for successful implementation, as well as recommendations for creating a more systemic approach to increasing diversity in geoscience education at all levels.

The IPBES conceptual framework (CF) serves an instrumental value to translate usable knowledge into policy across spatial scales, alongside a normative function to engage diverse knowledge systems, promoting inclusivity and enhancing legitimacy. It has been argued that the CF operates as a boundary object, a communication and organisation tool for those working across diverse knowledge systems, designed to help them reach shared goals. The paper focuses on this claim, exploring the three core characteristics of a boundary object: interpretive flexibility, material and organisational structure, and the recognition of dissention. We suggest that too much emphasis is placed within the CF upon interpretive flexibility, whilst meeting information needs and the work requirements of all individuals, groups and communities who use the CF are overlooked. By forcing consensus, the IPBES CF ignores the critical dimensions of a boundary object. We argue that embracing the full characteristics of a boundary object will enable the IPBES to support knowledge coproduction and translation across the knowledge systems, better achieving its goal of providing policy advice.

The insidious control over farming practices exercised by seed companies is an example of how powerful actors in the agri-food system promote profit over environment and health. More important, is the question of how we can shape a more desirable farming system that works for farmers, the public and the environment.

In Costa Rica considerable effort goes to conservation and protection of biodiversity, while at the same time 30 agricultural pesticide use is among the highest in the world. Several protected areas, some being wetlands or 31 marine reserves, are situated downstream large-scale banana farms, with an average of 57 pesticide applications 32 per year. The banana industry is increasingly aware of the need to reduce their negative environmental impact, 33 but few ecological field studies have been made to evaluate the efficiency of proposed mitigation strategies. This 34 study compared the composition of benthic macroinvertebrate communities up- and downstream effluent water 35 from banana farms in order to assess whether benthic invertebrate community structure can be used to detect 36 environmental impact of banana farming, and thereby usable to assess improvements in management practices. 37 Aquatic invertebrate samples were collected at 13 sites, using kick-net sampling, both up- and downstream 38 banana farms in fast flowing streams in the Caribbean zone of Costa Rica. In total, 2888 invertebrate specimens 39 were collected, belonging to 15 orders and 48 families or taxa. The change in community composition was 40 analyzed using multivariate statistics. Additionally, a biodiversity index and the Biological Monitoring Working 41 Party (BMWP) score system was applied along with a number of community composition descriptors. 42 Multivariate analyses indicated that surface waters immediately up- and downstream large-scale banana farms 43 have different macroinvertebrate community compositions with the most evident differences being higher 44 dominance by single taxa and a much higher total abundance, mostly of that same taxon. Assessment of 45 macroinvertebrate community composition thus appears to be a viable approach to detect negative impact from 46 chemical-intensive agriculture and could become an effective means to monitor the efficacy of changes/proposed 47 improvements in farming practices in Costa Rica and similar systems.

High intensity agricultural production systems are problematic not only for human health and\ud the surrounding environment, but can threaten the provision of ecosystem services on which\ud farm productivity depends. This research investigates the effects of management practices in\ud Costa Rica on on-farm insect diversity, using three different types of banana farm\ud management systems: high-input conventional system, low-input conventional system and\ud organic system. Insect sampling was done using pitfall and yellow bowl traps, left for a 24-\ud hour period at 2 locations inside the banana farm, at the edge of the farm, and in adjacent\ud forest. All 39091 individual insects were classified to family level and then morphospecies.\ud Insect species community composition and diversity were compared using multivariate\ud statistics with ordination analysis and Monte Carlo permutation testing, and revealed that each\ud of the management systems were significantly different from each other for both trap types.\ud Insect diversity decreased as management intensity increased. Reduced insect diversity\ud resulted in fewer functional groups and fewer insect families assuming different functions\ud essential to ecosystem health. Organic farms had similar species composition on the farm\ud compared to adjacent forest sites, whereas species composition increasingly differed between\ud farm and forest sites as management intensity increased. We conclude that while organic\ud production has minimal impact on insect biodiversity, even small reductions in management\ud intensity can have a significantly positive impact on on-farm insect biodiversity and\ud functional roles supported.

Today’s society faces many challenges when it comes to food production: producing food sustainably, producing enough of it, distributing food, consuming enough calories, consuming too many calories, consuming culturally-appropriate foods, and reducing the amount of food wasted. The distribution of power within the current mainstream agri-food system is dominated by multinational agri-businesses that control the flow of goods and wealth through the system. This hegemony has implemented a regime whose structures reinforce its control. A growing response to the current agri-food regime is the rise of agroecology, in both developed and developing country contexts. This is not a new phenomenon, but it has evolved over time from its Latin American origins. However, agroecology is not a monolithic block and represents many different perceptions of what it means to advance agroecology and ways in which it can help today’s society tackle the crisis of the agri-food system. This paper addresses these sometimes discordant view points, as well as the gaps in our knowledge regarding agroecology in an effort to lay out some guiding principles for how we can move forward in transforming the current agri-food system to achieve sustainability and a more equitable distribution of power and resources.

The concept of Ecosystem Services (ES) highlights that human wellbeing depends on nature and is a ‘whole system aware’ view. Land-sea systems are examples of complex systems including interfaces that can be perceived as boundaries, overlooking connections of the whole system. We explored the occurrence of several features of scientific knowledge building and governance of these systems that can hinder the recognition of connectivity, challenging an ES approach. We analyzed online survey responses from academics representing 22 research institutions and 13 case studies, all from Latin America. Results showed that the generation of scientific knowledge is not integrally approached and there are deficiencies in researchers’ communication with stakeholders across the land-sea interface. These drawbacks in scientific knowledge building could be one of the reasons why an ES approach is rarely applied on governance of land-sea systems. The cases showed segmented governance schemes and that conflict situations enhance the visibility of ecosystem relations. The establishment of long-lasting institutional instruments and the involvement of intermediaries connecting sectors are complementary paths to improve integrated governance. Using ES as a boundary concept could improve integration between sectors and ES trade-off analysis can help to introduce ecosystem relations to stakeholders related to their own interests. Fil: Alonso Roldán, Virginia. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Chubut; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Centro Nacional Patagónico. Instituto Patagónico para el Estudio de los Ecosistemas Continentales; Argentina Fil: Galvan, David Edgardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Centro Nacional Patagónico. Centro para el Estudio de Sistemas Marinos; Argentina Fil: Lopes, Priscila F. M.. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte; Brasil Fil: López, Jaime. Asociación Civil Comunidad y Biodiversidad; México Fil: Sanderson Bellamy, Angelina. Cardiff University; Reino Unido Fil: Gallego, Federico. Universidad de la Republica; Uruguay Fil: Cinti, Ana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Centro Nacional Patagónico. Centro para el Estudio de Sistemas Marinos; Argentina Fil: Rius, Pia Valeria. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Centro Nacional Patagónico. Instituto Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia "San Juan Bosco"; Argentina. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Chubut; Argentina Fil: Schröter, Barbara. Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research; Alemania Fil: Aguado, Mateo. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid; España Fil: Muñoz Barriga, Andrea. Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador; Ecuador Fil: Pittman, Jeremy. University of Waterloo; Canadá Fil: Ávila Flores, Giovanni. Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur; México Fil: López Gómez, Connie Paola. Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Colombia Fil: Góngora, María Eva. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia "San Juan Bosco"; Argentina

Large-scale, monoculture production systems dependent on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, increase yields, but are costly and have deleterious impacts on human health and the environment. This research investigates variations in banana production practices in Costa Rica, to identify alternative systems that combine high productivity and profitability, with reduced reliance on agrochemicals. Farm workers were observed during daily production activities; 39 banana producers and 8 extension workers/researchers were interviewed; and a review of field experiments conducted by the National Banana Corporation between 1997 and 2002 was made. Correspondence analysis showed that there is no structured variation in large-scale banana producers’ practices, but two other banana production systems were identified: a small-scale organic system and a small-scale conventional coffee–banana intercropped system. Field-scale research may reveal ways that these practices can be scaled up to achieve a productive and profitable system producing high-quality export bananas with fewer or no pesticides.

This paper presents research conducted during two coffee farming seasons in Costa Rica. The study examined coffee farmers' weed management practices and is presented in the form of a case study of small-scale farmers' use of labor and herbicides in weed management practices. Over 200 structured interviews were conducted with coffee farmers concerning their use of hired labor and family labor, weed management activities, support services, and expectations about the future of their coffee production. ANOVA and regression analyses describe the relationships between farm size, labor, and herbicide use, and three farm types (i.e., conventional, semi-conventional, and organic). Based on findings regarding the amount of labor used to manually control weeds on different types of farms (large farms, small conventional, semi-conventional, and organic farms) I am able to challenge small conventional farmers’ perceived need for herbicide use. Semi-structured interviews of coffee farmers and extension workers further revealed a dominant role played by agro-chemical companies in assisting farmers with production problems, and documented a high transaction cost for information provided from elsewhere. Chemical companies hire extension workers to visit farmers at their farms, free of charge, to offer recommendations on how to treat different pest problems, while government and cooperative extension agents charge for the service. There is a need to increase the amount of resources available to the National Coffee Institute to fund one-on-one farmer support services in order to balance the influence of agro-chemical company representatives and allow farmers to make better decisions regarding weed management.