Food system vulnerability: Using past famines to help understand how food systems may adapt to climate change

Throughout human history, food production has had to adapt to continuously changing environmental circumstances. In most cases, these challenges are met without any great hardship. In other cases, seemingly small environmental problems (such as droughts or floods) have devastating consequences. This suggests some food systems are more vulnerable than others. Assessing and identifying which regions are vulnerable to environmental problems, however, is challenging because food systems represent constantly evolving systems where farmers continually make decisions that help adapt to changing circumstances. Many existing theoretical frameworks to assess vulnerability fall along a continuum from those that are too macro (because they are based on large-scale generalizations that ignore local contextual issues) or are too micro (because they are so site specific that they obscure general trends). A landscape ecology approach offers an interesting compromise whereby scholars have used a small number of local variables (such as the diversity of species present in the system and the extent to which individuals in the system are connected to other individuals) to characterize the vulnerability of ecosystems to shocks such as wildfires and pest outbreaks. However, preliminary research suggests this approach may not work particularly well on human managed ecosystems. As such, this paper uses a range of historical examples (such as the Irish Potato Famine and El Niño induced famines in the late 18th century) to integrate these frameworks to help identify vulnerability within food systems to environmental changes.