CAREER: Advancing climate resilience of food supply chains through research and education

About This Grant

Climate risks impact food supply chains. As the geographic separation grows between food production and consumption, food supply chains are increasingly exposed to local and distant climatic disruptions. Current research has focused mostly on the production of a few staple crops, leaving substantial gaps in understanding domestic and international climate risks to an array of U.S. food supply chains. This project will pioneer new approaches to systematically detect, attribute, and track individual climate disruptions to food production along the entire food supply chain to locations of consumption in the U,S. Research findings will increase national capabilities to identify and track climate-associated food supply chain disruptions, thereby supporting investments and policies to enhance the resilience and competitiveness of the U.S. economy and protecting national food security against climate-related disruptions. The project will support a comprehensive education plan to achieve widespread reach at K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels and local, state, and national scales. The overarching question addressed by this project is: How, where, and to what extent do climate-related disruptions to food production travel through domestic and international supply chains to affect U.S. food supply? This project aims to create a quantitative framework to detect, track, and attribute climate disruptions throughout the entire food supply chain and the full food basket. The central hypothesis is that specific combinations of food items, climate extremes, and supply chain structures can collectively undermine the resilience of food supply chains. This research will systematically quantify climate risks and identify opportunities to enhance resilience through three objectives: i) measure climate vulnerability of U.S. crop production, ii) characterize national and global food trade networks, and iii) identify opportunities to reduce climate vulnerabilities. These activities will integrate with the project’s education goal to enhance understanding of sustainability and resilience through systems thinking. This plan includes developing science modules for middle and high school students and creating summer research opportunities for high school and undergraduate students, aiming to increase interest in STEM careers and interdisciplinary collaboration. This project is jointly funded by the ENG/CBET Environmental Sustainability program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.