Building resilient food systems at the regional scale: North America

As human population expands to 10-billion, we must find a way to feed people while decreasing agriculture's environmental impact. Many currently held beliefs about how to accomplish this involve increasing agricultural efficiency relative to resource use and pollution. While increasing efficiency is necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient, and may even reduce resilience. We need radically new approaches that build on a diversity of solutions operating at nested scales and that enhance the adaptive and transformative capacity needed to respond to disturbances and avoid thresholds. Finding these approaches requires experimentation, innovation and learning, even if they sometimes reduce short-term efficiency.