Sustainable Food Security: The value of systems thinking

Description

In this course, you will learn:

• Identify the main difficulties linked with food production and the concept of environmental sustainability.
• The fundamentals of systems thinking, including how different parts of a system interact with one another and how a system's context affects it.
• Crop and livestock productivity are important for environmental sustainability.
• Environmental indicators and how to assess the influence of food production on the environment at the farm, village, and regional levels
• Making decisions and assessing the life cycle
• Tools that are useful and their advantages and disadvantages

We'll look at production systems on both sides of the spectrum: high-productivity systems with high inputs and emissions to the environment, and low-productivity systems with low inputs and soil fertility depletion. The interplay of crops and livestock is a major focus.

Syllabus:

1. Complexity of sustainable food production systems
2. Introduction to systems thinking
3.  Productivity indicators of food production systems
4.  Environmental indicators of food production systems
5.  Trade-offs between sustainability indicators
6.  Integration module with two case studies