Course Details - Resilient and Sustainable Food Systems for a Food Secure Future
Insecure food systems
The world is changing and is becoming more unpredictable and uncontrollable. This holds for both social and natural conditions, with climate change and globalisation being major drivers of change in the world. People around the world are increasingly exposed to extreme weather events, economic crises, food crises, disease epidemics, social instability and political conflicts. The resulting insecurity not only affects the global social and economic systems, but also (local) food systems and their farmers who stand at the basis of food production.
Farming & food security in a changing world
Insecurity is inherently linked to farming. Increasingly farmers and other food chain actors are dealing in many ways with multiple and simultaneous shocks and changes affecting food systems. While coping with increased insecurity, the agricultural sector also needs to face future challenges of feeding a growing and urbanising population with changing dietary demands and at the same time reduce the environmental impact of agricultural activities. This requires sustainable intensification (getting more from less), with reduced vulnerability to perturbations. With these increasing uncertainties and future challenges in prospect, there is the need for development of resilient and sustainable food systems that can cope with unexpected shocks and ensure a food secure future.
Food systems approach
This course aims to offer a systems thinking and systems dynamics approach on agriculture as well as skills and tools to design innovative, resilient and sustainable food systems. It looks at how to balance between producing food, managing natural resources, dealing with uncertainty and providing an livelihood base for the rural population. It will move beyond the technical realm looking also at the role and involvement of public, private and civil stakeholders for inclusion of social, environmental, economic, and political aspects.
Course setting
The training is job-oriented and experience-based, therefore it is highly interactive: it provides participants with the opportunity to learn from a wealth of international experience available among themselves, the course facilitators and lecturers.
As a participant you receive an extensive, interactive and participatory training where theory is merged with practice. Course activities will comprise lectures, discussions, group work, case studies, assignments and field trips. The programme is flexible to suit participants’ needs and participants’ case studies are the basis of the group work and interaction. Furthermore, this course creates a unique opportunity to meet with course colleagues from around the world, with similar interest, and to share experiences and learn from each other.
This course is taught in a blended format: partially online and partially in an OKP country.
Our courses are currently taught blended and follow this format:
- Online pre-course assignments to ensure that you have acquired pre-required knowledge, understand the technical requirements of the online / hybrid learning.
- Interactive plenary sessions where we share content, facilitate exchanging experiences, challenge each otherthrough debates and discussion. During those interactive sessions we work witha number of online tools like Mentimeter, Jam Board and Mural.
- Group work either online, offline and face-2-face where you with other participants work jointly to answer specific questions and / or complete an assignment. During theface-2-face part of the course, the content and skills acquired during the online/hybrid part will be applied to a concrete case. Using backcasting each group will be guided and challenged to find innovate solutions for the identified problems, which will be presented at the end of the course.
- Individual assignments where you will read literature, watch videos, do exercises and take quizzes. These assignments are an essential part of the learning and most of them count for getting the certificate. They are meant to introduce or deepen knowledge and make the link between theory and your own situation.
- We offer coaching trajectories where we support you one-on-one or in small groups to review your individual learning paths in the course and help with any basic questions you may have.
The course is taught in partially online and the face-to-face part will be communicated soon.
Online platforms: Zoom and TalentLMS
Internet connection is important for the completion of the course. Not sure about the connection in your area? Send training.cdi@wur.nl an e-mail about your situation.
We use Zoom as the virtual classroom for the online part.
Our learning system is TalentLMS. Everything you need — our course programme, assignments, background information are in this system. Curator is easy to operate, can also be accessed by your phone and has an on-and offline functionality.
We organise a technical check-in before the course starts, to test your facilities and get familiar with the tools.
Course planning and certificates
The course workload is approximately 16-20 hours a week (2-2.5 workdays).
The exact programme of your course will be available 2-3 weeks before the start of the course. If you’ve successfully completed your course we send you a digital certificate.