Food security is obviously vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.  Yet assessing the vulnerability of broadly described food system to a host of global environmental changes requires a holistic, synthetic approach.  Much of the existing literature on vulnerability assessment focuses on either social or ecological systems, and conceptual gaps limit the holistic evaluation of linked systems, in which both social and ecosystem outcomes are important and feedbacks across scales are prevalent.  The Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) project has developed an approach which integrates across a food system to assess its vulnerability to environmental change, focusing on key processes and system characteristics.  Dr. Ericksen will describe the approach in detail in this lecture.

Dr Polly Ericksen holds degrees in History (BA), Economics (MSc) and Soil Science (PhD).  She has spent the past 17 years doing research (and some development practice) on agriculture, environmental management, poverty alleviation and food security in low-income countries and regions of Latin America, Africa and South Asia.  Most of her career has been spent in interdisciplinary and international research teams and settings. She currently works with the Global Environmental Change and Food Systems (GECAFS) project, based at the University of Oxford.   Most recently she has become interested in pathways for adaptation to climate change, and she is searching for useful tools and approaches to help work with a range of stakeholders on these issues.

RSPV: Caryn Anderson. NCEPH. 02 6125 5621

This lecture if free and open to the public. Presented by the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health.