Professional Short Courses

Designing for Food Systems Resilience: A Circular Approach

3, 4, 7 and 8 March 2022 | Online

Our global food system is comprised of a variety of food value chains – linear flows of resources associated with large volumes of waste, losses of nutrients and unequal shares of value. This take, make and dispose model is leading us to approach the limits of our earth system while leaving billions of people unable to access a healthy diet.

There is another way.

Redesigning value chains from the ground up, using the concepts of both circularity and solidarity, offers great potential to increase both the resilience and sustainability of food systems.

Resilience, circularity and solidarity are central elements of the concept of agroecology, which is “a way of redesigning food systems, from the farm to table, with the goal of achieving ecological, economic and social sustainability” (Gliessman, 2016).

In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and unprecedented biodiversity loss, the magnitude and urgency of tackling these challenges has never been greater.

That’s where you come in.

Applications now closed.

If you have any questions, please contact Toya Bezzola,

latinamericantomato

As a professional working in agriculture or food systems, we want to support you to transform food systems and tackle the sustainable development goals.

In this course, you will learn how to use systemic and transdisciplinary approaches to transform waste into resources, close loops, create shared value and leverage interconnections to design interventions that build resilience.

This course will offer you the chance to connect with likeminded professionals from around the world and engage in interactive and creative skill building opportunities. You will have the chance to step back from silos, look at the big picture and understand connections. And you will have the space for personal reflection about how to apply these concepts in your life and work.

We are passionate about creating engaging and inspiring learning environments where you play an active role in contributing to your own learning. We will make use of a wide variety of tools and platforms to keep you energized and motivated through the four days, with plenty of space to regenerate.

WFSC Summer School

The learning objectives for the course are as follows:

  1. Discuss and examine the elements of agroecology, with a focus on circularity and resilience, to build sustainable food systems;
  2. Apply systems thinking and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the system and design interventions;
  3. Extend your professional network; and
  4. Collaborate with colleagues from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds.

 

The Case for Tomatoes

A small portion of the program will include impulse inputs from experts to frame conversations. Most of your time will then be spent engaging with tools from transdisciplinary and systems thinking and applying them directly to a real-life case study on tomato value chains.

Originally from Mesoamerica, tomatoes are now consumed all around the world and are central to many cultures and cuisines. With the invention of heated greenhouses, tomatoes are now also grown all around the world all year long. The value chains that bring this crop of global relevance to our tables connect to many of the major social, political, economic and environmental challenges facing food systems, and tend to lack resilience in the face of shocks. Thus, the tomato value chain offers an excellent chance to ground the issues and make the topic tangible. Yet everything we will explore can be applied to other crops, value chains and systems.

tomato

Date + Time: 3, 4, 7 and 8 March 2022  from 11:00 - 17:00 CET

Length: 4 days

Format: Live, Online

Language: English

Fee: university/ public institutions/ NPO/ self-employed/ start-up rate: 650 CHF
corporate rate: 900 CHF
A limited number of scholarships are available.

Applications: Opens 06 December 2021, Closes 23 January 2022

Organizers: World Food System Center and ETH Zurich Sustainable Agroecosystems Group
Michelle Grant, Monika Piessens, Toya Bezzola, Kenza Benzabderrazik

 

The course brings a deep insight into how crucial is to tackle complex problems with a systemic approach, especially when are talking about increased resilience in food systems as a key for mitigating climate change and hunger on our planet. – Lorena de Oliveira Felipe, Doctoral candidate, Japan

The diversity of the presenters and the participants in terms of geographical locations, worldly experiences, cultural backgrounds, really made for such rich conversations that stretched one's own interpretations and assumptions about things and people and culture. Using that diversity and the frameworks of systems and design thinking to then see issues from a larger, well-mapped, systemic point of view is crucial to really seeing the whole, in order to work out from that whole, more compassionate, caring and holistic solutions. – Teresa D. Ruelas, Founder & Executive Director, Communities for Alternative Food Ecosystems Initiative, Philippines

This was an extremely well-designed course. I had a chance to interact with a group of motivated participants from all frontiers, coming together to solve a problem. We were introduced to some exciting tools and problem-solving techniques during this course. The interactive and dynamic nature of this course made it enjoyable and enriching at the same time. – Chandrima Shrivastava, Doctoral candidate, Empa, Switzerland

2021 Participants
2021 Participants

Read more about the 2021 course, which brought together 35 professionals from 20 countries here.

Please submit your application to the course via the provided link.

Application Form: external pagehttps://forms.gle/K6m2ojbKCADLvvPE7

Before filling out the form, please prepare the following ready for submission:

- Your Curriculum Vitae (CV), max. 2 pages, PDF and less than 10 MB
- Your short motivation statement, maximum one page, answering the following questions (minimum 600 characters each):

  1. What do you hope to get out of participating in the short course?
  2. What will you do with what you learn and how will others benefit from this?

Application deadline: 23 January 2022

If you have any questions, please contact Toya Bezzola, Project Manager Education and Research,

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