Bulding resilient foodscapes

On Friday 5 June, Dr. Laura Lengnick, an award-winning soil scientist working on the climate resilience of the U.S. food system, kicked off a day-long workshop that brought together centre staff and students working to understand how multifunctional landscapes contribute to community resilience. Dr. Lengnick is a member of the Department of Horticulture at North Carolina State University and owns Cultivating Resilience LLC, a climate risk management firm.

Dr. Lengnick shared the results of her national case study research designed to understand how sustainable producers in the U.S. manage their assets to reduce climate risks and enhance the climate resilience of their farm and food businesses. She focused on sustainable producers in this study because they are more dependent than conventional producers on ecosystem processes to provide critical production inputs.

The results of Lengnick’s study suggest that sustainable producers cultivate resilience to more variable weather and extremes, along with a diversity of other disturbances and shocks, by maintaining high soil quality, managing diversified production systems, and selling into multiple high value markets. Her results have been supported by other research with conventional producers in the U.S.

The workshop included presentations by centre researchers and colleagues from the Swedish Agricultural University (SLU) adding insights to the complexity of building resilience in muti-functional land and seascapes. The workshop was also a step towards building collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre and SLU, and Dr. Lengnick.

The presentation by Dr. Lengnick can be downloaded here.

There workshop was arranged by the Global Food System and Multifunctional land/seascapes at the centre.