Addressing dramatic social‐ecological shifts: Local food system resilience in the face of COVID‐19 and biophysical stressors

Abstract

Fostering the resilience of social‐ecological systems is vital due to the rising frequency and magnitude of dramatic shifts caused by climate change, biodiversity loss, conflicts, and global interconnectivity. The COVID‐19 pandemic, coupled with biophysical stressors, has jeopardized food security, emphasizing the need for contextualized coping strategies. Using a transdisciplinary and transformative framework, we assessed and modeled the locally perceived impacts of COVID‐19 and biophysical stressors—such as drought, flooding, and water pollution—on local food systems (LFS) and examined local coping strategies in three contrasting communities in Mexico. We employed a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, co‐developing fuzzy cognitive maps for each site. We identified favored coping strategies through participatory workshops and desirable changes through expert consultation. We simulated different impact scenarios of COVID‐19 and biophysical stressors, as well as local coping strategy scenarios to understand how these will affect the LFS. Findings show that COVID‐19 and biophysical stressors are mutually reinforcing, leading to concatenating negative impacts across the LFS that consistently hit income the hardest. These impacts mostly yielded undesirable changes, reducing most notably the ability to purchase and commercialize food. Achieving meaningful desirable changes requires a committed effort across a combination of coping strategies, with diversification being the most impactful. Enhancing the adaptive capacity, and triggering desirable synergistic effects, critically depends on local agency and endogenous coping strategies. A key contribution of this work is the collective learning process that facilitated reflection on impacts and coping strategies, deepening the understanding of LFS complexity.