Building Sustainable City Region Food Systems To Increase Resilience And Cope With Crises

Building sustainable city region food systems to increase resilience and cope with crises

Building sustainable and resilient city region food systems

The City Region Food Systems (CRFS) programme is a global initiative of FAO and RUAF that aims to support national and local governments and local food actors to build resilient city region food systems by strengthening rural–urban linkages and improving the resilience to climate and pandemic risks. This Handbook is designed for technical staff in local and national institutions, and practitioners in cities/city regions that are implementing the city region food system (CRFS) assessment and planning process. Its purpose is to help familiarizing with the CRFS approach and key terminology, and guide the implementation of an assessment and planning following different steps and modules. The Handbook is intended to be used in conjunction with the online Toolkit, which contains supplementary explanations, how-to tools, training materials, technical examples, and workshop resources related to activities within each project module. The Toolkit can be accessed on the CRFS programme website (https://www.fao.org/in-action/food-for-cities-programme/toolkit/introduction/en/).

Strengthening the resilience of city region food systems: A literature review following the COVID-19 pandemic

To enhance the resilience of food systems, it is essential to understand the long-term impacts of recent global shocks and stresses and extract key lessons learned. Shifts in consumption patterns and purchasing power are driving gradual adaptations and transformations within food systems, making these changes difficult to fully comprehend. Given this complexity, it is crucial to analyse how various stakeholders respond to these shocks and the resulting implications for the resilience and sustainability of food systems. This literature review seeks to clarify the concept of resilience in the context of city region food systems (CRFS). It highlights key principles that could strengthen CRFS resilience and focuses on the resilience capacities within these systems, examining the attributes needed to develop and support these capacities. By using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, the report explores the impacts, individual responses, and collective actions that reveal the complexities of CRFS. It also synthesizes a range of recommendations from the literature to improve food system resilience. Finally, it distills key lessons from the literature review and suggests a path forward.This report does not aim to exhaustively review the extensive and growing body of literature on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems, nor does it cover all aspects of food system resilience. Instead, it offers a targeted perspective on how the pandemic has influenced current thinking around food system resilience.