In the next section, we're going to talk about food system resilience. And I call this No Regrets, because as I'll discuss, a lot of the actions that are needed to advance food system resilience are what you could consider no regrets actions that even if nothing happened, it would still be a good thing to do them. And please stick around for the conclusions, because they're really important. Now remember, if you've swallowed an alarm clock, don't press snooze. So when we think of the developing world, it's relatively easy to make the connection that our food security is intrinsically wrapped up in having a healthy environment. This girl is sifting through the soil for any edible seeds, but these forces are distant and quite different from the food security and nutrition challenges most of us work to address here in the US. On the other hand, these are pictures from agriculture in Texas in the past few years, where they've experienced terrible drought. And we also have to keep in mind that when environmental factors contribute to hunger internationally, they are impacts here as well in terms of pressure on food prices because the system's so globalized, and potentially also in terms of conflict and migration. Here's images from the flooding in Louisiana with the cattle huddling together in the water. And here's a farm completely under water. And here's Baltimore, after another episode of severe flooding. So these kinds of incidents are happening everywhere, not only internationally. And currently, when they happen, there's a lot of scrambling. There hasn't been very much attention to how we preserve food system resilience, how we help food systems bounce back from crisis. And to the extent there's been attention, the vast majority of it has been focused on agriculture itself, but not how that plays out within a food system. So this man says, I think we may need to update our disaster recovery plan. This one suggests we all run around in circles shouting, what do we do, what do we do? And that's kind of what we've been doing. In this graphic, you've got a disaster that happens, with the arrow, and when the disaster happens, there's one thing that happens is resistance. And that's basically how far down does the system go, how bad do things get? And then you've got resilience, and you've got a recovery rate, and there can be different recovery rates in terms of how well things recover. And the way that they describe it, you can't actually really measure resilience until an event happens. What you can measure is pre-event community functioning, or you can measure your preparedness, but you can't measure, resilience is kind of a latent concept. Once a disaster occurs, community functioning drops sharply and then recovers over time So we had started talking about what does this mean in the Baltimore context. Following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, there was an uprising of anger related to police violence against the African-American community. There were also a lot of peaceful protests but one of the things that happened was that there was some rioting that occurred. And it really didn't last that that long but there was some significant damage done to food related businesses, and schools were closed, so kids that would normally get their food in school meal didn't necessarily have that. And so that played out, in terms of food access, and it revealed a lot of really critical vulnerabilities in the food system, and really increased the impetus to build something to build resilience. And as some examples of what were revealed, basically there was no coordinated system for response, so there was no food-related chain of command. People that focused on food weren't incorporated into emergency operations. The key players weren't necessarily, like there's a food policy group which I'm sure you'll hear about, that brings together a lot of people working on food within the city. But the players that needed to be there related to emergencies, and some of the community organizations weren't talking to each other. And so in terms of the kind of response that could be created, they all needed to be in the same quote room, and that could be a phone call, but they needed to be linked. And you need to have those relationships going on in advance so that when a crisis happens, you can connect instantly, you're not like introducing yourself. And there was no system really for organizing the food requests that would come in or donations or anything like that. It was just, everything was totally ad hoc. Now I will say that many individual players had their own responses and some of them actually had their own very detailed written plans on what to be done in various emergencies, but there was nothing coordinated about them and nobody knew what anybody else was doing, for the most part. A second challenge was that there were no protections organized for retail and food delivery. For example, larger supermarkets had their own security but there was nothing formal, like hey, one of the first places the cops should go should be to protect these businesses that are so important to communities. And businesses on tight margins lost money. In the case of food access in Baltimore, where you really don't want to lose any food businesses because you want to increase the number of food businesses, that's a problem. How do we address this? I'm going to show you a few different ways we're going about this. So one of them is that we're working closely with the City of Baltimore on doing an assessment for a plan that they can have for building food system resilience in the city. We're also looking at how do you take this beyond Baltimore and what can we do to strengthen the ability in other places to be thinking about these issues. And so part of that is creating indicators. So we've been working with engineers who think about these things very differently from how many of us in public health do. And one of the first things that they told us to do was map out so what are the actual potential causes of food system failure. And so what we did, this is called a fault tree in engineering terms, you start out with a food system failure and then you think of, so what are the reasons why food system failure could occur? And according to sort of a food security definition it could be because the food's not accessible, it's not available or not acceptable. So what are the reasons why each of those things could occur? Well if it's not accessible, it could be not economically accessible, it could be not physically accessible. Well, what are the reasons that it could be not economically accessible? And you take that all the way down until you get to a root cause. This next slide I'm not expecting you to be able to read, but it shows basically how we take each of those causes down. This only shows another couple layers, but this goes all the way down several more layers until at the end we have a set of indicators that we could track to assess food system functioning and potential ways that the system could fail. So then as we go about developing a plan, the first thing is there's a hazard assessment. So, what are the actual risks that we're concerned about? And some of this builds on the city's broader planning that they've done for a whole variety of systems. So they looked at how does flooding and coastal hazards, precipitation variability, extreme heat, wind, how do those kinds of factors affect transportation systems, health systems, other systems in the city? They didn't get to food partly because food is so very complex. So we're building on that prior work, but we're also bringing other things like civil unrest, terrorism, we're looking at cyber attack or disruption to the Internet system, pandemic, a whole range and types of hazards and we're looking at how each of these might affect things in the food system. Then, there's a vulnerability assessment. So, how might those play out in terms of ways that the food system can be harmed, like damaged buildings, lost electricity or communications, food or resource shortages and price rises, food contamination. There's also things like if people can't travel, either maybe they're stopped up because of snow or maybe they're under quarantine or the transportation system is damaged, businesses are closed, there's all kinds of different ways that we could be vulnerable. And what's really important is that there's very differential vulnerabilities across the population, whether its people with low income, people without their own transportation, people with disabilities, or seniors, and so on. So really with close attention to these differential vulnerabilities. The next piece is also looking at the assets that the city brings to this, so we have a whole set of existing preparedness activities focused on other issues. There's the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative that's already made our city a national leader on food policy issues. There's this Disaster Preparedness and Planning Project that I mentioned that already mapped out and planned for some other hazards, not looking at food, but they've still laid the foundation. We've got the City-university partnership, which is us plus the city working on it. But what's really key, also, is that this is a city, and probably this could be said of many other places, maybe most, that there's a lot of really amazing interpersonal connections going on everyday within the city and in any neighborhood. People are looking out for each other. And people check in when there's a big snow storm and they say, do you have enough food, do you want me to get you something? And we've been doing interviews, many interviews, and we're hearing this throughout, that people looked out for each other in crisis. And then there's strong organizations throughout the city that also are facilitating that opening up of an emergency food pantry, or a lot of them said, you know, we do what it takes. So if we have to go out there and drive in our personal car and make it happen, we do whatever it takes. So all those pieces come together. As a result of that, we have a good foundation for understanding the kinds of things that might need to happen for emergency preparedness in the short term, like having sets of procedures and contacts and collaboration communication going on. Prioritizing food among other types of services that are addressed. You know like, what are we going to plow first? Let's plow by the food stores and the bus stops that get us to them. Really thinking about how we communicate with communities to make sure that the information that needs to get out gets out, and it's through public sources as well as through informal sources. Emergency food and water sites, regional cooperation, but I want to come back to this collaboration and communication because in some ways that's at the heart of it, is having the right people at the table and talking to each other to bring about, to help understand what the problem is and what we're going to do about it in the short term. Each of the listed vulnerabilities will have a set of strategies related to addressing it within the plan, but I want to also talk about what's known as no regret actions, and the concept is that there's a lot of things that we can do, to strengthen the community functioning, the pre-event community functioning. If you think back to that resilience chart, the stronger the pre-event community functioning, the stronger the resistance, or the less impact you get when an event hits and the better the recovery is, a theory that many are working on, and that we are also going to be looking at in the future. And to the extent that's true, strengthening the city's food system in any number of ways, strengthening food access, strengthening community, food networks, all those things, even if we never get another storm or even if we never lose power, those are "No regret" actions that are still really beneficial for strengthening our community functioning in general. And then once the plan is put in place, of course there's implementation, maintenance, and evaluation. And I want to say that even in the absence of any of these crises, there are many people who can't afford food, who don't have food access. Our food system's already in failure but there's so much that we can do to reduce the impact of these kinds of events that could make it far worse. And this is all talking about Baltimore, a city that's relatively well positioned. I mean, we don't face the kind of severe threats that many other cities in this country face and, even more so, that places around the world face. But this is one kind of approach that can really be helpful in building resilience. So finally, let me turn to the conclusions. I'm going to start by raising for you six essential challenges that I want you to think about and you can discuss it in a live talk. And the first one is in identifying the most sustainable course of action when we often are operating without adequate evidence. We don't often get to know what's most sustainable, even if somebody may know it. And there's sometimes people with interests in having us think that something is sustainable when it may not be. And there's even contested definitions of what we mean by sustainability, or resilience, or even health or justice. So identifying the course of action to take and be is really often our first challenge. The second challenge is who's going to benefit and who's going to decide about what action we take? And how do we make sure that the people that have the most to lose are at the table and often in leadership positions? The third thing is can we sit back and wait for technology to save us? And I think there are a lot of people that think like, yeah, it's bad, there's a lot of threats, but we've always survived before, and we will in the future and if we just wait, technology will catch up. And I'd say that you know it's possible that it will, but it's a real open question how far it can go and some of the technologies that have saved us in the past have created their own problems that sometimes have been worse than the thing that were put in place to address. I don't have an answer to any of these questions, either. These are questions to think about and you may have your own opinion. The fourth one is cost-effectiveness in short time horizons. So many of the things that we need to do will ultimately prove to be cost-effective, but policy decisions are made in quite short time horizons when we think of politician election cycles or annual budgets of companies or whatever. So how do we find ways to show cost effectiveness in the short time horizons? The fifth challenge is, can we shop our way to sustainability? There are so many green products out there and some of them really are much better for the environment than their alternatives. But is more shopping the way to get there, and what is the role of corporations? What is the role of scale? Is Walmart organic a good thing, or not a good thing? That's a matter of opinion. And finally I would ask, can we afford to invest in sustainability? It's not cheap in the short term, and the flipside question to that is, can we afford not to? I want to wrap up by summarizing a set of key messages from this talk. So the first one is understanding the difference between sustainability, or the ability to keep on going, and resilience, or the ability to bounce back. And I want to emphasize as a message that we can't have either of those without equity. The second thing is that the definitions of all these pieces are very contested. Third, our long-term food security is threatened and whatever we want to think about how we can test the definitions or whatever we say, we are at risk and so we need to take action. Food loss and waste, and meat maybe wedges or opportunities for breaking into some of these threats. There are many strategies available to improve sustainability and resilience, and frankly I've barely touched the surface in the description, the overview that I gave you. And many of these strategies have strong co-benefits for public health, which gives us an advantage in building them and also present as cost-effective. We have to address the social sciences, so we can't engineer our way out of any of this. We have to be thinking about preferences, psychology, economics, politics, power and history and if we're not bringing in the social side, we will fail. Many of us are walking around with an alarm clock ticking inside, feeling that anxiety. We can't press snooze. The threats are real, but so too is the opportunity to advance real change. And with your knowledge, and with the skills and unique qualities that each of you bring to this, you're well positioned to take the actions needed, and to come up with new actions that will further advance this cause. And that helps quell the ticking, at the same time as it helps us all move toward a healthy, sustainable, resilient food system. [MUSIC]
