The Climate-Biodiversity-Health (CBH) Nexus and Integrated Food Systems Planning

Rob Newell received a grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop and apply an experimental sustainability framework to community food systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted vulnerabilities and gaps in community food systems, presenting planners and decision-makers with the significant challenge of (and opportunities for) developing communities in ways that increase local food resilience and sustainability. These issues however are not exclusive to pandemic impacts, indicating a need for integrated strategies and policies that broadly increase community sustainability and resilience. The proposed research aims to advance the theory and practice of integrated community planning by developing an experimental framework and applying it to local food systems. The framework will consist of three strategic areas that are critical to sustainable development: 1) climate action; 2) biodiversity conservation; and 3) community health, and it is referred to here as the climate-biodiversity-health (CBH) nexus. Applying the nexus to different community planning areas (in this case, food systems) can elucidate how certain strategies, policies, and actions align or conflict with imperatives for sustainable development.
The research objectives include to build understanding on how communities can better engage in integrated food systems planning and policy and to develop tools for supporting these efforts. Other nexus frameworks, such as water-energy-food, and the three-pillar (i.e., social, economic, and environmental) model of sustainability have provided a means for thinking about integrated planning; however, they have also been criticized for their ambiguity, creating challenges for applying concept to practice. The CBH nexus will deliberately incorporate key strategic planning areas (i.e., climate action, biodiversity conservation, and community health) to serve as goals-oriented framework that could provide clearer direction for integrated planning. It thus may serve as a useful means for developing local food systems in a holistic manner that recognizes broader sustainable objectives.
The research uses a community-based participatory approach that involves working with local governments and stakeholders in the Comox Valley, British Columbia, to develop theory, tools, and approaches for integrated planning and policy. The research uses a variety of research methods and techniques (e.g., semi-structured interviews, workshops, document analysis, systems mapping, scenario modelling), and it consists of three phases. The first phase examines climate action, biodiversity conservation, and community health strategies occurring in the communities in the case study region, and it results in the development of a CBH framework. The second phase develops systems models that capture relationships among strategies, benefits, trade-offs, and challenges within the CBH nexus, and it applies these models, employing document analysis and semi-quantitative scenario modelling techniques to examine how different local food systems strategies potentially align or conflict with climate, biodiversity, and heath objectives. The third phase gathers researchers, collaborators, and participants to discuss research findings and explore challenges and opportunities for integrated food systems planning and policy.
The proposed research contributes theory and scholarly insights to the fields of integrated planning and (broadly) sustainable community development. The work also results in practical outcomes with the potential to support and enhance community planning practices. The models developed in the second phase are made publicly available for practitioners to use for their planning needs, with a report on their development and application. A policy document is produced at the end of the project, presenting research findings and recommendations for integrated food systems planning and policy.