Q & A on Sustainable Food Security Preparedness
Crises expose the fragility of food systems worldwide
Secure access to healthy food in sufficient quantities is a basic human right. In Sweden, the conditions for ensuring food supply through both domestic production and international trade have long been good and stable, making food preparedness a relatively low political priority.
At the same time, food systems around the world are vulnerable in times of crisis. Experiences from Covid-19, extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, and the shifting geopolitical landscape following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have increased and clarified this vulnerability. Recent developments have highlighted how deeply interconnected supply chains are—both for agricultural inputs and for food production overall.
Without a functioning agricultural sector, we have no secure food supply. Without healthy ecosystems, we have no agriculture. Therefore, climate, agriculture and the environment must be viewed as an integrated whole. Only when we take this connection seriously can we build a sustainable and resilient food system for the future. Investing in climate-resilient agriculture is essential to ensure that we continue to have food on the table.
Sweden has excellent conditions to produce high-quality food. We have fertile soils, good access to water, and have already taken important steps in the green transition. By further developing our production, we can not only supply the domestic market but also contribute to global food security.
In Sweden, approximately 15% of emissions come from agriculture. Swedish food consumption exceeds five out of six planetary boundaries when scaled per capita. Addressing sustainability challenges in food systems while ensuring that everyone has access to sufficient, safe and healthy food is a major undertaking that requires changes in both production methods and consumption patterns.
We need to complement short-term solutions with long-term strategies
Food system preparedness often focuses on handling short-term disruptions, for example through stockpiling inputs and finished products. Stocks can bridge temporary interruptions, but a resilient system is prepared to withstand, adapt to and, when necessary, reorganize itself to function in new ways while maintaining supply. Research identifies three key components of resilience relevant for agriculture and the food system as a whole:
Robustness:
Capacity to withstand disturbances. Stockpiling is one example.
Adaptability:
Ability to manage disruptions through alternative supply chains, inputs or production pathways. This is supported by diversified systems—different crops, livestock species, production methods and processes—that spread risk.
Transformation:
A system’s capacity to adjust when previous methods no longer work, reorganizing production while still ensuring access to healthy food in sufficient quantities.
What is “resilience” in the food system?
Resilience is the system’s ability to withstand and recover from shocks. A resilient food system can endure breakdowns in trade routes, failed harvests or energy shortages. It is prepared to resist disruptions, adapt to them, and remain flexible enough to reorganize and function in completely new ways—while still delivering food even when normal supply chains are disrupted.
What is food preparedness?
Access to food is a fundamental part of societal security and a human right. Food preparedness is about ensuring that people have access to sufficient healthy food—even in crises such as war, pandemics, droughts or disruptions to trade.
What is sustainable food preparedness?
If we build preparedness without considering environmental and resource constraints, we risk creating major long-term problems—degraded soils, water scarcity and loss of biodiversity. Agriculture’s ability to produce food depends entirely on natural resources and ecosystem services—natural functions that make cultivation possible. This includes pollinators such as bees, which ensure fruit and berries develop, and healthy soils that allow crops to grow. When climate and environmental conditions change, these critical processes are disrupted, creating significant challenges for agriculture.
A food system can only be robust if it is also environmentally and socially sustainable. Strengthening food preparedness without also transitioning towards sustainability risks leading to ineffective solutions, where investments fail to support both preparedness and long-term sustainability. This can result in wasted resources and high costs. If storage, technology or infrastructure are developed without a sustainability perspective, we risk locking ourselves into resource-intensive structures that cannot meet future challenges.
Examples of how sustainability and preparedness can reinforce each other
Sustainability transitions and preparedness can strongly support one another, and the knowledge to build sustainable preparedness already exists. Within the research programme Mistra Food Futures, we have studied around twenty measures that can reduce agriculture’s climate impact, and several of them also strengthen agricultural resilience—especially to supply chain disruptions caused by greater geopolitical tensions. Examples include:
- A fossil-free agricultural and food chain: Electric tractors, for instance, provide significant climate benefits and can be powered by locally produced solar and wind electricity—independent of national grid stability or international logistics. The technology already exists, but policy incentives and financial support are needed to accelerate the transition. The entire food chain—from processing and packaging to transport—must also become fossil-free.
- Thoughtful crop rotations and cultivation of cover crops (e.g. clover, oats, rapeseed, rutabaga), which improve soil health and reduce the need for mineral fertilizers and pesticides—strengthening both resilience and environmental performance while providing feedstock for biogas.
- Improved irrigation capacity and drainage to handle more extreme weather in a warmer, wetter and drier climate.
- A shift away from feeding livestock with crops that humans can eat directly.
About three-quarters of Sweden’s agricultural land is used for fodder crops. Future livestock systems need to rely on resources humans cannot eat—such as grass from pastures, ley grass (grass and clover), and by-products from the food industry—rather than imported soy. Ley crops can be grown locally and suit Swedish climate conditions well. - Producing fats using yeasts grown on straw or wood, which can be used for biodiesel production, reducing dependence on imported diesel, and also replace rapeseed oil in fish feed.
What unites these examples?
They show that the same measures that reduce climate impact can also strengthen resilience. It is about combining environmental benefits with increased self-sufficiency, flexibility and technological innovation.
How does an unstable climate affect our ability to produce food?
Agriculture depends entirely on environmental conditions, natural resources and ecosystem services. When the climate changes, these vital functions are disrupted.
In a stable climate, agriculture can produce predictable quantities of food, supporting reliable supply and stable prices. When the climate becomes more extreme and unpredictable, both food availability and economic stability are threatened—affecting producers, households, Sweden, Europe and the world.
Investing in climate-resilient agriculture is absolutely necessary to ensure future food security. If we understood how strongly the food on our plates is connected to climate change, we would likely act differently and with greater urgency. Securing future food supply means investing in agriculture that can handle a changing climate—what we call resilient agriculture. This includes developing new farming methods, maintaining soil fertility, protecting water resources and strengthening biodiversity.
Why is a systems perspective important?
Within Mistra Food Futures, we emphasize the importance of considering multiple perspectives simultaneously to understand how a transition to a sustainable and resilient food system can occur. One example is viewing food preparedness and sustainability as linked policy areas, enabling more coherent strategies and opening opportunities for public investments that strengthen both.
The programme design is based on recognizing the complexity of the food system and the need to examine both natural and social science perspectives. Nature, ecosystems, consumers, producers, economic systems, policy and future studies are all critical components. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research—as well as collaboration across sectors—is essential.
Considering multiple perspectives at the same time is crucial for finding solutions that are both effective and sustainable. Decision-makers, industry and citizens all play an important role in thinking systemically and identifying both trade-offs and synergies. Oversimplified messages often lead to oversimplified problem definitions—and therefore to solutions that are misdirected or insufficient.
What challenges does the swedish food system face?
The food system faces two major challenges: 1. becoming more sustainable, and 2. strengthening food preparedness. Both require major investments and behavioural changes.
Research shows that these transitions can support each other, as measures that promote sustainability often also increase resilience. In practice, however, they are usually treated separately, which risks inefficiency—such as investing in preparedness in a system that is not sustainable. Aligning investments and policies to support both goals can save time and resources while creating more robust structures.
Here are some concrete challenges that must be addressed:
- Heavy dependence on imported feed crops, mineral fertilizers and fossil energy—making us vulnerable.
- Low domestic production of fruit, vegetables and legumes despite high potential.
- Dietary patterns that need improvement; the current food environment encourages unhealthy and environmentally harmful choices. Half of Swedish adults are overweight or obese, and 16% of young teenagers have overweight or obesity.
- A changing risk landscape with multiple simultaneous disruptions (pandemics, extreme weather, geopolitics).
- Biodiversity loss due to simplified landscapes, pesticide use and abandonment of pasturelands; in the oceans, unsustainable fishing threatens marine ecosystems.
- Economic challenges for farmers and food businesses making transitions that require upfront investments but provide long-term gains.
What does competitiveness within planetary boundaries mean?
It means that businesses must be profitable while staying within the limits of the planet. It is misguided to focus on competitiveness first and postpone sustainability—or vice versa. The only viable path is integrating both. Business models that do not support sustainable development are not viable long-term.
A food system that appears profitable but harms public health and depletes natural capital will eventually produce large societal costs. We therefore need to account for these hidden costs when assessing the efficiency and success of the food system. A narrow perspective risks missing opportunities where one change can support multiple goals.
What do researchers mean when they say we can start already?
Many solutions already exist—tested and documented. We do not need to wait for new inventions. The challenge is to scale up what works and implement it broadly in policy and practice.
What happens if we do all this?
Then we can simultaneously reduce climate impact, strengthen agricultural independence, secure access to food and build a system capable of withstanding future crises—creating truly sustainable food preparedness.