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

美国生产的40%的食物从未被食用过。这些废物不仅构成复杂的废物流，对环境和生态造成负面影响，而且还包括生产中使用的资源损失、企业和家庭的经济成本损失以及营养价值损失。然而，否则会被浪费的粮食可以被重新利用为资源，例如，制定防止损失的战略，通过将高质量的剩余粮食转移到粮食不安全的社区来增加粮食供应，将营养物质回收用于农业生产，以及将粮食废物转化为生物能源，为区域基础设施提供动力。美国的目标是到2030年将食物浪费减半，这是一个雄心勃勃的目标，需要研究产生新的知识，并与社区，企业和政府建立伙伴关系，将这些知识付诸行动。该可持续区域系统研究网络（SRS RN）将开展融合研究，以了解美国各地区食物浪费的方式和原因，然后创建可以最大限度地减少和可持续管理浪费的解决方案。研究将与政策，行业，市政当局，非营利组织和商业部门的利益相关者联盟共同创建，以转化可实施的战略，为政策提供信息，并指导整个食品系统的最佳实践。 与此同时，建立在“学生科学”基础上的综合教育平台将用于建立本科食品系统期刊，教育K-12学生，与少数民族和残疾服务机构合作，让学生参与研究经验，培训下一代可持续发展劳动力，并通过公共宣传和课程促进公众参与和理解。如果成功的话，可持续粮食系统的多尺度食谱SRS RN将帮助发展新的基础设施，保护国家的粮食安全。这个SRS RN将组建一个由研究人员、学生和利益相关者组成的聚合团队，共同创建新的数据、模型、变化理论和可推广的解决方案，以：1）了解导致浪费的区域粮食系统内的驱动因素和相互作用; 2）推进解决方案，提高粮食系统的可持续性，公平性和弹性; 3）整合孤立的知识，创造趋同的研究和系统变革。该SRS RN将为区域系统创建新的方法，以跨规模和区域环境聚合，管理和可视化数据。这些数据将用于模拟粮食系统的相互作用，量化可持续性，公平性和弹性的相应变化，并生成可推广的类型学，用于分析不同情景下的可持续区域系统。该项目中的变革性科学包括收集和整合数据的新方法，这些数据在多个尺度上阐明了浪费食物的潜在驱动因素，从估计单个人的盘子浪费的先进成像科学和计算农场损失的农业模型，到衡量整个地区粮食捐赠潜力的社区参与研究，以及估计整个国民经济中粮食和废物流动的模型。然后，一个新的多尺度建模框架将使用这些数据来评估粮食系统的弹性，公平性和可持续性，以及新技术，政策，教育和利益相关者驱动的解决方案来改善这些结果的潜力。一个以人为本的设计框架将被应用于促进这些合作，并研究有效促进融合的机制。不同区域的横截面将被用来创建分类组织和环境的类型学，然后可以概括为预测不同区域系统及其相关基础设施，生态，治理，文化和经济系统之间的共同利益和权衡。教育活动将与RECIPIES研究计划相结合，并由RECIPIES研究计划指导，并扩大RECIPIES研究计划的产出。该网络将吸引广泛的学术受众，提供知识和研究技能，以改变公众对粮食系统的理解。网络研究、教育和参与活动将使用网络科学、以人为本的设计和混合方法的方法进行评估，作为未来研究网络的指南。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.