Sustainability transitions in the context of pandemic: an introduction to the focused issue on social innovation and sys
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SYMPOSIUM/SPECIAL ISSUE
Sustainability transitions in the context of pandemic: an introduction to the focused issue on social innovation and systemic impact Geoffrey Desa1 · Xiangping Jia2 Accepted: 13 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract For society to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the agri-food industry needs a substantial sustainability transition toward food systems capable of delivering greater volumes of nutritious food, while simultaneously lowering the environmental footprint. This issue of AHV focuses on the big picture—on mechanisms of sustainability transition, from social innovation, to models of finance and institutional systems, and calls for business and agricultural researchers to transform the sector together. Contributors to this issue embrace a transdisciplinary outlook, including scientific, technical, social and political dimensions of agroecology. This issue is a call to action: to encourage the community of social entrepreneurs, ecosystem players and researchers to contribute analytical methods, experiences and scientific insights on emerging social innovations related to food, agriculture and rural–urban transformation. Keywords Sustainability transition · Social innovation · Agroecology · Food · Agriculture
Introduction The global agriculture and food industry has an enormous economic and environmental impact. Valued at $8 trillion USD (van Nieukoop 2019) and employing over 1 billion people,1 the industry also accounts for approximately half of all land use, 70% of water use and one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC 2019). For society to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the agri-food industry needs a substantial sustainability transition toward food systems capable of delivering greater volumes of more nutritious food, while simultaneously lowering the environmental footprint (FAO 2018; Hawken 2017). Despite this global imperative, the economic incentives are skewed against research and action. While large in real terms, the industry contributed less than 4% to global GDP (FAO 2019a). Public and private R&D resources for food and land
* Xiangping Jia [email protected] Geoffrey Desa [email protected] 1
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA
Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China
2
use systems together account for 0.1% of global GDP (FOLU 2019, p. 171), with limited funds for open-source research (Heisey and Fugley 2018; FAO 2017). From the perspective of business researchers, the industry is a niche sector with limited potential for academic research.2 However, this view of a small, siloed research sector with limited investment importance, misses the big picture and a big opportunity. The industry is going through one of the greatest changes since the post-war period, with changing consumer preferences, technology enabled productivity improvements, and turmoil in domestic and international markets (Djanian and Ferreira 2020). To meet these challenges, res
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