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Scoping Potential Routes to UK Civil Unrest via the Food System: Results of a Structured Expert Elicitation

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posted on 2024-04-26, 14:35 authored by Aled Jones, Sarah Bridle, Katherine Denby, Riaz Bhunnoo, Daniel Morton, Lucy Stanbrough, Barnaby Coupe, Vanessa Pilley, Tim Benton, Pete Falloon, Tom K Matthews, Saher Hasnain, Pat Heslop-HarrisonPat Heslop-Harrison, Simon Beard, Julie Pierce, Jules Pretty, Monika Zurek, Alexandra Johnstone, Pete Smith, Neil Gunn, Molly Watson, Edward Pope, Asaf Tzachor, Caitlin Douglas, Christian Reynolds, Neil Ward, Jez Fredenburgh, Clare Pettinger, Tom Quested, Juan Pablo Cordero, Clive Mitchell, Carrie Bewick, Cameron Brown, Christopher Brown, Paul J Burgess, Andy Challinor, Andrew Cottrell, Thomas Crocker, Thomas George, Charles J Godfray, Rosie S Hails, John Ingram, Tim Lang, Fergus Lyon, Simon Lusher, Tom MacMillan, Sue Newton, Simon Pearson, Sue Pritchard, Dale Sanders, Angelina Sanderson Bellamy, Megan Steven, Alastair Trickett, Andrew Voysey, Christine Watson, Darren Whitby, Kerry Whiteside
We report the results of a structured expert elicitation to identify the most likely types of potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK, focusing on routes to civil unrest. We take a backcasting approach by defining as an end-point a societal event in which 1 in 2000 people have been injured in the UK, which 40% of experts rated as “Possible (20–50%)”, “More likely than not (50–80%)” or “Very likely (>80%)” over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, this increased to 80% of experts. The experts considered two food system scenarios and ranked their plausibility of contributing to the given societal scenario. For a timescale of 10 years, the majority identified a food distribution problem as the most likely. Over a timescale of 50 years, the experts were more evenly split between the two scenarios, but over half thought the most likely route to civil unrest would be a lack of total food in the UK. However, the experts stressed that the various causes of food system disruption are interconnected and can create cascading risks, highlighting the importance of a systems approach. We encourage food system stakeholders to use these results in their risk planning and recommend future work to support prevention, preparedness, response and recovery planning.

Funding

S.B. (Sarah Bridle) and A.J. (Aled Jones) are funded by an APEX Award from the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society AA21\100154 for “How to feed the UK amid catastrophic food system disruption”. T.B., S.B. (Sarah Bridle), A.S.B. and N.W., are grateful for funding from the AFN Network+ (UKRI Agri-food for Net Zero Network+) Grant Award EP/X011062/1. Alexandra Johnstone acknowledges funding from the Transforming the UK Food System for Healthy People and a Healthy Environment SPF Programme, delivered by UKRI, in partnership with the Global Food Security Programme, BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, Defra, DHSC, OHID, Innovate UK and FSA. Grant Award BB/W018020/1, for FIO Food: Food Insecurity in people living with Obesity—improving sustainable and healthier food choices in the retail food environment. S.B. (Sarah Bridle) and K.D. acknowledge funding from the same above: the Transforming the UK Food System for Healthy People and a Healthy Environment SPF Programme. Grant award FixOurFood programme (BB/V004581/1). P.F. was supported by the Met Office Food, Farming and Natural Environment Climate Service, funded by Defra and the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme, funded by DSIT. Christian Reynolds was funded through Transforming the UK Food System for Healthy People and a Healthy Environment SPF Programme, Grant Award BB/V004719/1 Healthy soil, Healthy food, Healthy people (H3)

History

Author affiliation

Organisation Organisation/College of Life Sciences Organisation/College of Life Sciences/Genetics & Genome Biology

Published in

Sustainability

Volume

15

Issue

20

Pagination

14783 - 14783

Publisher

MDPI AG

eissn

2071-1050

Copyright date

2023

Available date

2024-04-26

Language

en

Deposited by

Professor Pat Heslop-Harrison

Deposit date

2024-04-11

Data Access Statement

A spreadsheet of numbers used to create the main figures is included for convenience: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ydvzqyodak455b8ovu8tb/EE23_data_for_figures.ods (accessed on 7 October 2023), The full cleaned anonymised multiple-choice results are provided here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/npf0c49klg7ky3y6in1c2/Airtable_EE23_230808_cleaned_anonymised.csv (accessed on 7 October 2023). Free-text comments are included as Supplementary Materials with this paper.

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