Wicked problems in food system solutions
‘Wicked problems’ describe complex socio-environmental challenges, where efforts to solve one part of a problem can lead to unintended new problems. Proposals to improve food systems sustainability often have disparate emphasis on either ‘supply side’ or ‘demand side’ strategies—targeting either social and environmental dimensions of food production or socioeconomic, health, and nutritional dimensions of food consumption. Food system sustainability strategies are also often aimed at a relatively small set of social or environmental outcomes or are formulated without considering linkages to solutions in other parts of the food system (either geographically or along food supply chains).
This Workshop will therefore center around two main questions:
(1) How can we move from conceptual models to quantitative assessments of wicked food system problems within different types of global models?
(2) What capabilities do specific global spatially-explicit food system models (e.g., PLUM-LPJ-GUESS, MAgPIE, and INRA-Organic) have in representing multiple potential wicked food system dynamics?