BUILDING RESILIENCE TO SHOCKS AND DISRUPTIONS: CREATING SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE LOCAL AND REGIONAL FOOD SYSTEMS IN THE US MIDWEST REGION AND BEYOND

The goal of this project is to promote Local and Regional Food System (LRFS) sustainability by building the resilience of LRFS to multiple shocks (e.g., extreme climate events, pandemics, foodborne pathogens) via a transdisciplinary systems approach that integrates research, education, and extension activities. This goal will be accomplished through nine interrelated objectives:1. Investigate key agri-food system characteristics and supply chains with a focus on LRFS and diverse operators to identify hotspots of vulnerability and weak links from production to consumption across various agri-food supply chains.2. Quantify the impacts of multiple shocks on the production and flows of LRFS, "hotspots" of vulnerability, resultant implications for American diets and nutritional intake, and spatial-temporal agri-food system dynamics that create inequities and diet diseases.3. Develop a typology of shocks, and identify and evaluate alternative actionable resiliency strategies (e.g., diversification) to mitigate vulnerabilities and enhance adaptive capacity to multiple shocks to build resilience in LRFS and nutrition security.4. Construct an interactive web-based, multi-scale, spatially explicit, multi-agent-based systems model to simulate and assess the impacts (e.g., interactive, cumulative, and cascading) of multiple shocks and alternative strategies on the resilience and sustainability of food systems under various scenarios.5. Design, develop, and test a real-time, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled, decision support system to enable stakeholders to better proactively prepare for, and rapidly respond to multiple shocks - in terms of food access, food equity, and nutrition security as well as productivity.6. Determine the impact of food supply chain disruptions on food security and nutritional consequences to the US population, and examine whether nutritional inequities result.7. Create, test, and deploy user-friendly extension curricula to disseminate research findings and best practices for improving resiliency to key stakeholders, including local producers and consumers, news media, and decision-makers.8. Design, implement, and validate novel educational/training materials for K-12, undergraduate and graduate students: case studies, workshops, and courses that integrate research findings.9. Build an integrated and interactive research-extension-education platform to share and inspire innovative solutions for improving agri-food systems' resilience and sustainability.