Building Resilience into our food and energy systems

On this episode I,  Dr. Tara Naylor is talking about building resilience into our energy and food systems. 

The topics that are being explored are: 

• What resilience is, in this context, 
• Why it is important and
• What some of the characteristics of resilient systems are. 

I also want to talk about some of the ideas that excited me as a young engineer on the food and energy front. I also plan to discuss some of our key challenges going forward and some of the ways we can face them to have the best chance of successfully navigating them.

This is a topic that I think about daily. Where I live, we have been through a winter with multiple disruptions on the electricity supply front. In fact, many of my notes for this episode have been written with my headlamp on my head, as our power is out due to a storm. 

On the food front, I have been working on my own food sovereignty and security for quite a few years now. Partly because I want to have the right to choose what goes into my body and where it came from, but also because I want to make sure I always have access to the food I want and need. 

So what is resilience in this context? Resilience is simply the ability of an ecosystem, species or other system to absorb a disturbance and still retain its basic function, structure or identity. 

There is a slightly different definition I found for community resilience and that is the ability of the community to absorb the effects of shocks and stresses and to recover rapidly to a better condition than they were in before. 

Just think about some of our key human systems like water systems, energy systems, transportation systems, food systems, communication systems. What would life be like, particularly in a city if any or several of these systems failed? We have all seen the fear and panic buying that has happened on food, bottled water, toilet paper, batteries, gasoline and generators either in anticipation of a big storm or after one or when the global pandemic started taking hold in 2020. 

So what are the characteristics of resilient systems? Because some of these characteristics are opposite to the way our major economics and other key systems are structured today AND, in some cases, they are opposite to the way some climate and sustainability actions are unfolding.