Restructuring the food system after COVID-19

By Husam Ibrahim, International Science Council (ISC)

The IIASA-ISC Resilient Food Systems report looks at the vulnerabilities in the food system and recommends changes to move forward through COVID-19 recovery plans that prioritize society’s least protected.

Credit: Adam Islaam – IIASA

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and brought to the fore existing vulnerabilities and global interdependency in societal institutions, including the food system. The pandemic has exaggerated the scarcity in some areas’ food supplies and highlighted the divide between the haves and have-nots.

The number of people suffering from poverty had been on a steady decline, going from 2 billion people in 1990 to 740 million in 2015. However, for the first time in decades, the global poverty rate is once again increasing due to the pandemic. Early estimates suggest that an additional 88 million to 115 million people may suffer extreme poverty, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021.

The socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic are further exacerbating inequalities within and between  countries, and intensifying the rise in food insecurity observed since 2014. It has been estimated that the effects of the pandemic could have longer-term repercussion for low-income countries, greatly undermining their development prospects, unless sufficient international support is provided.

In order to explore how the world can recover from the crisis sustainably, IIASA and the International Science Council (ISC) launched the Consultative Science Platform: Bouncing Forward Sustainably Post COVID-19. The two organizations have drawn on their combined strengths, expertise, and large scientific communities, to come up with a set of insights and recommendations based on a series of online consultations that have brought together over 200 experts from all regions of the world. The Resilient Food Systems report is a contribution to this effort.

Resilient Food Systems

Transformations within reach:
Pathways to a sustainable and resilient world

 

 

 


While the pandemic exerted supply and demand shocks across economic sectors, the report highlights that the food system was particularly affected by impacts on employment and income in relation. This is because international food supply has been strong, and the supply-demand ratios have remained stable throughout the pandemic. However, job and income losses, insufficient safety nets, and constraints on local access to food created conditions for food insecurity.

Lack of access to basic services, such as water and sanitation, and the prevalence of informal employment, have forced many people in low- and middle-income countries to make the impossible choice between following physical distancing measures or maintaining basic income and access to food. Before the pandemic, an estimated 3 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet on a consistent basis.

Therefore, the report argues that the emphasis on efficiency – which has in large part been driving the evolution of food systems – must be balanced with an emphasis on concerns related to resilience and equity. With this, the food system can combat future crises while serving society’s most vulnerable. The recovery process should be harnessed to strengthen the preparedness of the food system to manage multiple risks.

As highlighted by the pandemic, this would entail expanding the scope and reach of social safety nets and protection schemes. Future food systems should be characterized by better pricing-in of environmental externalities. The sustainable management of natural resources should be seen as an integral part of strengthening the resilience of food systems, recognizing also the close linkage between human and planetary health concerns.

‘ In light of resilience and sustainability concerns the focus should be on using agricultural areas that we already have, rehabilitating degraded environments, and looking into the potential of diversification of practices and technologies.’

Frank Sperling, Senior Project Manager, IIASA

The role of different agricultural practices in building resilience needs to be looked into. This includes high-tech solutions like biotechnology, as well as an increase in the trade of agricultural goods, a sustainable increase in crop yields, and using underutilized crops to their full potential.

This also means protecting biological diversity, minimizing the destruction of pristine natural environments and focusing on the regeneration of natural ecosystems.

The report also states that strong international institutions are necessary to coordinate policies and limit tensions between multiple social, economic, and environmental interests represented within food systems internationally. Further funding, integration, and emphasis on context-specific solutions can help make changes, and emerging action-oriented knowledge and funding platforms are being used to help transform the food systems.

‘It is very important that these reforms are characterized by global collaboration, keeping nutritional security at the forefront with society’s most vulnerable people in mind, so that no one gets left behind.’

Frank Sperling, Senior Project Manager, IIASA

For more information on how COVID-19 is impacting the food system, and the lessons learned from the pandemic, read the IIASA-ISC Resilient Food Systems Report.


You can also watch the discussion on Strengthening Science Systems as part of the launch event for the Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World, which explores the key themes of Sustainable Energy, Governance for Sustainability, Strengthening Science Systems and Resilient Food Systems.

This blog post was first published on the website of the International Science Council. Read the original article here.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Enhancing science systems and bouncing forward sustainably from COVID-19

By Husam Ibrahim, International Science Council (ISC)

The IIASA-ISC Consultative Science platform has engaged transdisciplinary global thought leaders to produce four reports that focus on a more sustainable pathway to a post COVID-19 world. This blog post looks at the report on Strengthening Science Systems.

Credit: Adam Islaam – IIASA

Science has spoken reason to power and politics, expanded open science practices, and found a vaccine in record time during this pandemic, yet perceptions of how science has responded overall to the current crisis still vary. There is a broad consensus that there is considerable room for improvement in science systems in the general context of rapidly evolving global exogenous shocks.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a cautionary tale about the importance and necessity of science: we will face crisis, we know that, and we will best address it through science, but science itself stumbles along and science needs to be more humble, be better educated and not only communicate their knowledge but also communicate the limitation of their knowledge so that science systems can move towards a better frontier.”

– David Kaplan, Senior Research Specialist, ISC 

In 2020, IIASA and the International Science Council (ISC) combined their strengths and expertise to define and design sustainability pathways that will help all levels of global governance be better prepared and more resilient in protecting from future systemic shocks.

In these testing times, policymakers and the general public have looked to science for insight, reliable solutions, and actionable advice. The Strengthening Science Systems report addresses how science systems can be better prepared when an inevitable crisis hits again.

The report puts forward a large number of recommendations, grouped under five interrelated major transformative changes:

Strengthen transdisciplinary research and networking on critical risks and systems resilience

As seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, risks can spread globally regardless of their origin. It is in the interests of all countries to work together and provide support to one another. Most notably, developed countries need to help further strengthen scientific capacities with financial support, technology support and technology transfer for developing countries.

On the other hand, while risks may be global, the manner in which they play out and particularly the way in which different societies respond, show considerable variation. Local scientific capacity has the ability to address the local context and develop effective strategies to address risk. This will allow local scientists to put knowledge on disaster risks at the core of disaster risk reduction policies.

Enhance communication of scientific knowledge, public understanding, and trust in science

Trust in science and in the recommendations emanating from scientists are key to the effectiveness of science-based policies. This is especially important as science denial and misinformation have increased during the pandemic. Communication, transparency, and broad public understanding of how science works are three foundations which will enhance trust in science.

Scientists themselves should therefore be incentivized to play a more active role in combating misinformation in their fields, as they are best equipped with the facts. Alongside that, easily accessible sources of scientific results that are simpler for a mass audience to understand should be created in a wider array of languages.

Enhance knowledge diffusion within the science system

Peer-review systems have been shown to be somewhat inadequate in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Peer-review systems need to be more agile, international, rigorous, and inclusive in terms of access and avoiding bias if science is to meet the challenges of future crises.

International organizations of science, including the ISC and UNESCO, can take a lead in devising a more effective system of peer review through dialogue with international disciplinary bodies, national academies, publishers, and national research councils.

Increase the capacity of the science system to respond rapidly to crises with high-quality research

Some countries lack adequate disaster research institutions. These institutes cannot be created in a short period of time and need prior infrastructural efforts, so there needs to be ample support and funding of smaller research institutions in advance of possible disasters. Collaborative efforts between big and small research institutes on a global and local scale are highly recommended. Governments also need researchers who can be on standby and they need to allocate funds that are easy to access during a crisis.

Improve the quality and efficacy of science-policy interfaces at national, regional, and global levels

Science advice has moved to center stage when dealing with policies to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has challenged national science–policy systems. Lessons have been learned about how science can become a more effective input into policy. This involves further international scientific cooperation among institutions engaged in science-policy advice, to enhance the quality of science inputs to policy.

International collaboration allows for sharing of evidence and the emergence of a scientific consensus. This consensus can then be communicated to policymakers who, in turn, need to interact more with the wider academic community to systematically review their country’s policies.

These are some of the conclusions from the five lessons on interrelated transformative changes for the science system cited in the report. They show three axes of improvement that are required to ensure that science can react more efficiently to such exogenous shocks: increased agility, enhanced reliability, and a more effective science-policy-society interface. The main overarching objective is to simultaneously improve all three axes, thereby moving science systems to a new frontier.


Strengthening Science Systems

Read the full report

Read the one-page summary

 

You can also watch the discussion on Strengthening Science Systems as part of the launch event for the Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World, which explores the key themes of Sustainable Energy, Governance for Sustainability, Strengthening Science Systems and Resilient Food Systems.

 

This blog post was first published on the website of the International Science Council. Read the original article here.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Open science has to go beyond open source

By Daniel Huppmann, research scholar in the IIASA Energy Program

Daniel Huppmann sheds light on how open-source scientific software and FAIR data can bring us one step closer to a community of open science.

© VectorMine | Dreamstime.com

Over the past decade, the open-source movement (e.g., the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI)) has had a tremendous impact on the modeling of energy systems and climate change mitigation policies. It is now widely expected – in particular by and of early-career researchers – that data, software code, and tools supporting scientific analysis are published for transparency and reproducibility. Many journals actually require that authors make the underlying data available in line with the FAIR principles – this acronym stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The principles postulate best-practice guidance for scientific data stewardship. Initiatives such as Plan S, requiring all manuscripts from projects funded by the signatories to be released as open-access publications, lend further support to the push for open science.

Alas, the energy and climate modeling community has so far failed to realize and implement the full potential of the broader movement towards collaborative work and best practice of scientific software development. To live up to the expectation of truly open science, the research community needs to move beyond “only” open-source.

Until now, the main focus of the call for open and transparent research has been on releasing the final status of scientific work under an open-source license – giving others the right to inspect, reuse, modify, and share the original work. In practice, this often means simply uploading the data and source code for generating results or analysis to a service like Zenodo. This is obviously an improvement compared to the previously common “available upon reasonable request” approach. Unfortunately, the data and source code are still all too often poorly documented and do not follow best practice of scientific software development or data curation. While the research is therefore formally “open”, it is often not easily intelligible or reusable with reasonable effort by other researchers.

What do I mean by “best practice”? Imagine I implement a particular feature in a model or write a script to answer a specific research question. I then add a second feature – which inadvertently changes the behavior of the first feature. You might think that this could be easily identified and corrected. Unfortunately, given the complexity and size to which scientific software projects tend to quickly evolve, one often fails to spot the altered behavior immediately.

One solution to this risk is “continuous integration” and automated testing. This is a practice common in software development: for each new feature, we write specific tests in an as-simple-as-possible example at the same time as implementing the function or feature itself. These tests are then executed every time that a new feature is added to the model, toolbox, or software package, ensuring that existing features continue to work as expected when adding a new functionality.

Other practices that modelers and all researchers using numerical methods should follow include using version control and writing documentation throughout the development of scientific software rather than leaving this until the end. In addition, not just the manuscript and results of scientific work should be scrutinized (aka “peer review”), but such appraisal should also apply to the scientific software code written to process data and analyze model results. In addition, like the mentoring of early-career researchers, such a review should not just come at the end of a project but should be a continuous process throughout the development of the manuscript and the related analysis scripts.

In the course that I teach at TU Wien, as well as in my work on the MESSAGEix model, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C scenario ensemble, and other projects at the IIASA Energy Program, I try to explain to students and junior researchers that following such best-practice steps is in their own best interest. This is true even when it is just a master’s thesis or some coursework assignment. However, I always struggle to find the best way to convince them that following best practice is not just a noble ideal in itself, but actually helps in doing research more effectively. Only when one has experienced the panic and stress caused by a model not solving or a script not running shortly before a submission deadline can a researcher fully appreciate the benefits of well-structured code, explicit dependencies, continuous integration, tests, and good documentation.

A common trope says that your worst collaborator is yourself from six months ago, because you didn’t write enough explanatory comments in your code and you don’t respond to emails. So even though it sounds paradoxical at first, spending a bit more time following best practice of scientific software development can actually give you more time for interesting research. Moreover, when you then release your code and data under an open-source license, it is more likely that other researchers can efficiently build on your work – bringing us one step closer to a community of open science!

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

How to reverse global wildlife declines by 2050

IIASA researchers Michael Obersteiner, David Leclère, and Piero Visconti discuss the findings of their latest paper, which proposes pathways to reverse the current trend of biodiversity loss and shows that the next 30 years will be pivotal for the Earth’s wildlife.

Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund. The sharpest declines have occurred throughout the world’s rivers and lakes, where freshwater wildlife has plummeted by 84% since 1970 – about 4% per year.

But why should we care? Because the health of nature is intimately linked to the health of humans. The emergence of new infectious diseases like COVID-19 tend to be related to the destruction of forests and wilderness. Healthy ecosystems are the foundation of today’s global economies and societies, and the ones we aspire to build. As more and more species are drawn towards extinction, the very life support systems on which civilization depends are eroded.

Even for hard-nosed observers like the World Economic Forum, biodiversity loss is a disturbing threat with few parallels. Of the nine greatest threats to the world ranked by the organization, six relate to the ongoing destruction of nature.

© Chris Van Lennep | Dreamstime.com

Economic systems and lifestyles which take the world’s generous stocks of natural resources for granted will need to be abandoned, but resisting the catastrophic declines of wildlife that have occurred over the last few decades might seem hopeless. For the first time, we’ve completed a science-based assessment to figure out how to slow and even reverse these trends.

Our new paper in Nature featured the work of 60 coauthors and built on efforts steered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. We considered ambitious targets for rescuing global biodiversity trends and produced pathways for the international community to follow that could allow us to meet these goals.

Bending the curve

The targets of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity call for global trends of terrestrial wildlife to stop declining and start recovering by 2050 or earlier. Changes in how land is used – from pristine forest to cropland or pasture – rank among the greatest threats to biodiversity on land worldwide. So what are the necessary conditions for biodiversity to recover during the 21st century while still supporting growing and affluent human societies?

Two key areas of action stand out from the rest. First, there must be renewed ambition from the world’s governments to establish large-scale conservation areas, placed in the most valuable hotspots for biodiversity worldwide, such as small islands with species found nowhere else. These reserves, in which wildlife will live and roam freely, will need to cover at least 40% of the world’s land surface to help bend the curve from decline to recovery for species and entire ecosystems.

The location of these areas, and how well they are managed, is often more important than how big they are. Habitat restoration and conservation efforts need to be targeted where they are needed most – for species and habitats on the verge of extinction.

The next 30 years will prove pivotal for Earth’s biodiversity. Leclère et al. (2020) © IIASA

Second, we must transform our food systems to produce more on less land. If every farmer on Earth used the best available farming practices, only half of the total area of cropland would be needed to feed the world. There are lots of other inefficiencies that could be ironed out too, by reducing the amount of waste produced during transport and food processing, for example. Society at large can help in this effort by shifting towards healthier and more sustainable diets, and reducing food waste.

This should happen alongside efforts to restore degraded land, such as farmland that’s becoming unproductive as a result of soil erosion, and land that’s no longer needed as agriculture becomes more efficient and diets shift. This could return 8% of the world’s land to nature by 2050. It will be necessary to plan how the remaining land is used, to balance food production and other uses with the conservation of wild spaces.

Without a similar level of ambition for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, climate change will ensure the world’s wildlife fares badly this century. Only a comprehensive set of policy measures that transform our relationship with the land and rapidly scale down pollution can build the necessary momentum. Our report concludes that transformative changes in our food systems and how we plan and use land will have the biggest benefits for biodiversity.

But the benefits wouldn’t end there. While giving back to nature, these measures would simultaneously slow climate change, reduce pressure on water, limit nitrogen pollution in the world’s waterways and boost human health. When the world works together to halt and eventually reverse biodiversity loss, it’s not only wildlife that will thrive.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. Read the original article here.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

The coronavirus crisis as an opportunity for an innovative future

By Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Director of and Emeritus Research Scholar at IIASA

IIASA Emeritus Scholar Nebojsa Nakicenovic explains how the societal disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic can offer an opportunity for a more sustainable and innovative future.

While the future of humanity has always been unpredictable, major challenges⁠ — like the current pandemic — have been an inevitable part of our shared history. What is different now, however, is that human beings have become the dominant force of planetary change. In other words, the Anthropocene has arrived, and with it an unprecedented opportunity to steer our collective future.

Science, technology, and innovation (STI) are the drivers of this change, and can also be the means of achieving a sustainable, equitable, and resilient future for both human civilization and the biosphere. These tools, however, need to be complemented with the necessary evolutions of our economies, public institutions, and behavioral norms. The rapid rise in inequality and resource consumption over the last few decades, for example, has led to increasing pressure on people and the planet in ways that are clearly unsustainable. It is within this context that the COVID-19 pandemic could become a disruptive event that triggers fundamental change toward a more desirable future for all.

Human history is rich with other instances of rapid social and environmental evolution, from the agricultural turn of the Neolithic Revolution some ten thousand years ago to the explosive changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. However, it was the ‘great acceleration’ of the last 50 years, characterized by exponential growth of consumption and rapid degradation of planetary support systems, that brought us to the geophysical limits of our home world for the first time. These rapid developments were neither smooth nor pervasive, and were interlaced with many crises, wars and pandemics, natural disasters, and numerous other disruptive events. Yet over the last 200 years we’ve seen a 7x increase in the global population, a 100x increase in economic output, and a 20x increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

Photo by Holger Link on Unsplash

In the aftermath of major crises that caused deep disruption, loss of life, and the destruction of capital and jobs, a ‘new normal’ eventually emerged — the major depressions of the 1870s and 1930s, as well as the oil crisis of the 1970s, are just three examples among many. Events like these arguably amplified the limits and disadvantages of the ‘old’ and paved the way for the ‘new’, with each crisis catalyzing innovation and the re-direction of human activities towards a fundamentally new direction. Today, we might say that each caused a tipping point that led to new development and behavioral pathways.

The COVID-19 pandemic, one of the greatest threats to human societies in recent memory, can be seen as a similarly catalytic event. While history does not repeat itself, there are many similarities in the response strategies to earlier pandemics such as the Black Plague of the middle ages and the Spanish Flu of the 1920s, including policies of ‘social distancing’ and isolation and barriers of entry to those from ‘outside’. Even the word quarantine (meaning ‘forty days’ in Venetian) was first coined during the plague epidemic of the 14th century.

Photo by Cheng Feng on Unsplash

Today’s crisis, as in the past, has revealed the worst parts of our nature, as with the callous exclusion of the needy, homeless, and migrants from the emerging responses, as well as the hoarding of perceived scarce goods by the well-off. At the same time, the pandemic has brought out some of the best human characteristics: self-sacrifice in helping others, renewed empathy and solidarity, and unprecedented global cooperation within science and between governments as we work to stem the worst of the pandemic.

Moreover, there is mounting evidence that the partial shut-down of the global economy has had demonstrably positive effects on the environment, such as reduced emission levels, lower pollution, and a resurgence in wildlife. While an economic depression is by no means a viable mitigation strategy for climate change and other pressing environmental issues, these data make clear that the right policies and priority investments in STI could have immediate and significant effects in our efforts to transition to a sustainable world.

Many scientists, policymakers, and other stakeholders are already working to leverage this current moment of opportunity into lasting change. , a global research agenda aiming to help reach the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, offers six transformations that outline essential STI, institutional, and behavioral synergies to achieve the new direction for human development while providing critical support for the most vulnerable among us. The , a group of leading scientists convened by , is working to underpin the development of science-based targets for systems like land, water, and biodiversity in order to guide companies and cities towards sustainable pathways, as many thought leaders are beginning to reconsider the stability and efficiency of our current economic systems. Thomas Piketty, for example, has that every person should receive $120,000 at age of 25 to enable innovative initiatives among those who lack the capital to do so. Bold efforts like these will become increasingly necessary as we work towards a new set of planetary operating parameters that will ensure an equitable and sustainable future for all.

Our response to COVID-19 could help redirect trillions of dollars towards this agenda. While current measures aim to preserve existing institutional and economic arrangements, we should press decision makers to actively channel these funds into the drivers of innovation to bring about the future we want to live in. This deep and ongoing crisis may destroy some of the ‘old’ characteristics of this moment in human history, and could bring about the transformations in sustainability that will enable us to build a better future for all life here on Earth. The risk is that exactly the opposite will happen — and that is a risk that humanity cannot afford to take.

This piece was originally published on Medium and Future Earth.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.