Building Resilience in Food Systems under Climate Change: Integrating Adaptation, Mitigation, and Transformation

With unprecedented pace and intensity, global climate change is imposing systemic risks on the entire food system, spanning production, storage, processing, transport, and consumption, through multiple pathways such as extreme climate events, rising mean temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and sea level rise. Traditional response strategies that focus solely on yield growth are no longer sufficient to address future uncertainties. Building food system resilience characterized by robustness, adaptability, and transformative capacity has thus become an urgent and central issue on the global sustainable development and food security agenda. However, significant gaps remain in current research. These include a predominant emphasis on production stages with insufficient attention to post-harvest, logistics, and market stages; resilience assessments that largely rely on historical static analyses without simulating future dynamic evolution and cascading risks; solutions that tend to promote single technologies while neglecting integration with ecological, social, and institutional dimensions; and limited quantitative assessment of the economic costs of food system losses under climate shocks.This Research Topic aims to dismantle disciplinary silos and cultivate systems thinking by convening scholars from agricultural economics, agronomy, ecology, social sciences, data science, and engineering. The collective endeavour seeks to explore multi-scale systemic solutions that span climate-smart production practices at the farm level, emergency buffering mechanisms for supply chain disruption risks, and autonomous adaptive governance at the local community level. The special issue is structured around four interconnected thematic pillars: refined assessment and scenario projection of climate change risks; resilience enhancement through nature-based solutions and agroecological approaches; market risk spillover effects and mitigation mechanisms of food supply chains under extreme climate event shocks; and sustainability of farmer livelihoods based on climate vulnerability stratification. This Research Topic places particular emphasis on the economic dimensions of resilience-building, including the costs, incentives, financing mechanisms and market implications of adaptation and mitigation strategies across the food system, alongside the synergies between adaptation and mitigation actions, the livelihood security of vulnerable groups, and the advancement of systemic transformation through technological innovation and institutional change. This Research Topic welcomes a broad spectrum of contributions, including original research articles, review papers, methodological studies, and policy analyses. The research outcomes will provide scientific evidence for updating the agricultural and food system components of Nationally Determined Contributions, offer empirical support for tracking food security progress within the Global Stocktake, and deliver scientific decision-making references for the operational design of the Loss and Damage Fund, especially in the context of post-disaster recovery for smallholders and compensation for supply chain disruptions. Ultimately, this Research Topic is committed to establishing a robust economic and scientific foundation for food systems confronting the climate crisis, ensuring that these systems can maintain stable nutritional supply and ecosystem services amid climate disturbances, while simultaneously achieving a socially just and economically viable adaptive transition.Authors are encouraged to submit Original Research, Review Articles, Mini Reviews, Perspectives, Methods, Policy Analyses, and Case Studies addressing themes including, but not limited to:• Climate risk and food security• Adoption behavior and extension policies of climate-smart agricultural technologies• Cost-effectiveness and incentive design for agricultural soil carbon sequestration• Carbon emission accounting and abatement cost analysis in food systems• Food supply chain disruption risk and adaptive governance under climate change shocks• Differential impacts of climate change on food security and livelihoods among vulnerable groups and intervention strategies• Economic valuation and cost-benefit analysis of nature-based solutions for agroecosystem resilience• Economics of agricultural waste recycling and circular resource recovery• Refined assessment and projection methods for food system risks under climate change• Collaborative pathways and multi-objective optimization strategies for food system adaptation and mitigation goals Topic editors: Mingjun Hu, Mengying Feng Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85321/building-resilience-in-food-systems-under-climate-change-integrating-adaptation-mitigation-and-transformation