SRS RN: Multiscale RECIPES (Resilient, Equitable, and Circular Innovations with Partnership and Education Synergies) for Sustainable Food Systems

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Forty percent of food produced in the US is never eaten. Outside of contributing to a complex waste stream that creates negative environmental and ecological impacts, this waste contains lost resources used in production, lost economic costs to businesses and households, and lost nutritional value. However, food that would otherwise be wasted can be repurposed as a resource by, for example, creating strategies to prevent losses, increasing food access by diverting high-quality surplus to food-insecure communities, recycling nutrients back into agricultural production, and converting food wastes into bioenergy that powers regional infrastructure. The U.S. aims to halve waste of food by 2030, an ambitious goal that will require research to generate new knowledge and partnerships with communities, businesses, and governments to put this knowledge into action. This Sustainable Regional Systems Research Network (SRS RN) will carry out convergent research to understand how and why food is wasted in regions across the U.S. and then to create solutions that can minimize and sustainably manage waste. Research will be co-created with a coalition of stakeholders in policy, industry, municipalities, non-profit, and business sectors to translate implementable strategies, inform policy, and guide best practices across the food system. In parallel, a comprehensive educational platform built on “student science” will be used to establish an undergraduate food system journal, educate K-12 students, partner with minority and disability serving institutions to engage students in research experiences, train the next generation of sustainability workforce, and foster public engagement and understanding through public outreach and curriculum. If successful, the Multiscale RECIPES for Sustainable Food Systems SRS RN will aid in the development of new infrastructure and protect the Nation’s food security.This SRS RN will assemble a convergent team of researchers, students, and stakeholders to co-create novel data, models, theories of change, and generalizable solutions to: 1) understand the drivers and interactions within regional food systems that lead to waste; 2) advance solutions that will enhance the sustainability, equity, and resilience of the food system; and 3) integrate siloed knowledge to create convergent research and systems change. This SRS RN will create new methods for regional systems to aggregate, curate, and visualize data across scales and regional contexts. This data will be used to model food system interactions and quantify consequential changes in sustainability, equity, and resilience and to generate generalizable typologies for analyzing sustainable regional systems under different scenarios. The transformative science in this project includes new approaches to collect and integrate data that elucidate underlying drivers of wasted food at multiple scales, from advanced imaging science that estimates plate waste of a single individual and agricultural models that compute on-farm losses, to community-engaged research that measures food donation potential for an entire region and models that estimate food and waste flows spanning the national economy. A new multiscale modeling framework will then use these data to evaluate food system resilience, equity, and sustainability and the potential for new technology-, policy-, education-, and stakeholder-driven solutions to improve these outcomes. A human-centered design framework will be applied to facilitate these collaborations and to study the mechanisms that effectively foster convergence. A cross-section of diverse regions will be used to create typologies that classify organizations and contexts that can then be generalized to predict co-benefits and tradeoffs across different regional systems and the linked infrastructure, ecology, governance, cultural, and economic systems therein. Education activities will be integrated with, be guided by, and amplify outputs of the RECIPIES research programs. The network will engage a broad range of academic audiences, providing knowledge and research skills to transform public understanding of food systems. Network research, education, and engagement activities will be evaluated using methods from network science, human-centered design, and mixed-methods approaches, serving as a guide for future research networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.