Innovation lab for sustainable preparedness in food supply

Research Project, 2022 – 2024

A sustainable emergency preparedness has become urgent as a result of overlapping social crises such as drought, the corona pandemic and Russian aggression, not least in the food supply. The scientific and practically proven state of knowledge is at the same time neglected. The project aims to support Swedish and international actors in the food supply with research-based knowledge about how sustainability and preparedness skills can be integrated into practice. To realize this, we propose an innovation lab where researchers and practitioners together examine sustainable preparedness from a competence perspective. In joint exercises and workshops during the project´s three years, we intend to experiment with scenarios where sustainability and preparedness skills are integrated to solve common challenges between acute crises in the food sector and its transformation. The project will explore how a sustainable preparedness in the food supply can be understood as competence under development and how it can be executed during and before societal crises. An important effect of better understanding sustainable preparedness as a developing competency is initiatives that address both preparedness and transformation problems in the food sector collaboratively rather than either individually. Such initiatives can therefore be expected to become attractive for many actors to spread as examples for transformation to develop a long-term sustainable, resilient food supply.