Essay Sample on Food System Resilience

Introduction

The contemporary society is experiencing significant challenges such as climate change, increased population growth and urbanization, and the United States is no exception. These challenges threaten food security and urban food systems. There are some threats which make food systems vulnerable. These threats have long term and short term consequences. Some of these threats include severe storms as a result of climate change, which causes power outages. The severe storms also damage food stores and warehouses, block roads among other effects. There are also sections of the United States which experience drought and the situation reduces the supply of food across the country. The case also raises the prices of food at the respective locations. Policy, research, and education are significant ways of ensuring the resilience of food systems. The underlying meaning is that the policies, education and research strategies are essential in setting up a more resilient food system to ensure the continuous supply of accessible and safe food. The following is a plan which the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Agriculture would implement to ensure maximum resilience in agriculture and the food system in the United States.

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Climate-Resilient Food Systems

The food systems are essential in the aspect of climate surprises, re-organizing and adapting to retort to pressures, and recuperating rapidly from dangerous occasions. The government of the United States can ascertain the resilience of food systems by associating the function and state of the structure afore and subsequent real shock. Through gathering relevant information using research, the United States can establish a climate resilient food system in the specific regional and local contexts.

Climate Adaptation

Folke, Colding, and Berkes (2003) came up with four constellations of elements which are essential in building resilience in the socio-ecological systems of the United States. These elements include:

Merging diverse types of knowledge through building capacity as a way of monitoring the environment. It also involves building capacity for participatory management.

Learning to keep up with uncertainty and change through learning from predicaments and also coming up with surviving strategies.

Cultivating variety in its different forms. These include enhancing diversity in institutions to create political space for experimentation and responding to change.

Creating and developing opportunities for cross-scale links and self-organization. These include developing building capacity and multi-level governance which is essential for user organization.

Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System Framework

According to the United States Agency for Development Asia (2004), there were guidelines and framework which the Indian Ocean Tsunami System developed as a way of assessing the coastline communal resilience to an extensive series of hazards such as thrilling storms, Tsunamis, resource degradation, and soil erosion. The importance of the framework is that it looked at the effects of the exogenous and endogenous threats which it compared to the pre-shocks and after-shocks status of livelihoods as a way of determining resilience. IOTWS suggested eight resilience elements which the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Agriculture can implement. These elements include:

• Facilitating leadership and governance to implement legal frameworks as a way of providing communities with essential services
• Diversifying livelihoods of economies and societies to reduce dependence on coastal resources
• Land use and structural design
• Notification and alerts of hazards through warnings and conducting evacuations
• Disaster recovery
• Emergency response

Risking knowledge through appropriate decision making by disaster authorities.

Conclusion

The above plan and approach have a high potential and ability to help the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Agriculture cope up with the threats and shocks which face food systems in the United States. However, Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of Agriculture need to learn much to authenticate food system resilience from an logical outlook.

References

Folke, C., Colding, J., & Berkes, F. (2003). Synthesis: building resilience and adaptive capacity in social-ecological systems. Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change, 9(1), 352-387.

United States Agency for International Development Asia. (2004). Program summary: US Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System (IOTWS) Program. http://usaid.eco-asia.org/files/fact_sheets/IOTWS.pdf