June 11-13, 2013
Tällberg, Sweden
Meeting Synopsis
The Knowledge Systems for Sustainability Collaborative was invited by the Tällberg Foundation to bring together ~40 global leaders from business, academia, government, multilateral international organizations, and civil society to map out large-scale efforts toward dynamic, integrated reflections of systemic risks and opportunities to improve sufficiency and resilience in agriculture and food systems. Private/private, public/private and public/public collaborations were highlighted in pre- and post-competitive space that focus on sharing data, information, knowledge, analytics, improved reflections of risks, and opportunities related to humanity’s sustainable provisioning at the land/water/energy nexus. We assembled frontier globally significant initiatives, and best-in-class organizations to focus collectively on innovative approaches to challenges at various scales in food systems. Further, we focused on consequences of and potential opportunities created by failures in global food systems in human and environmental dimensions. Alignments, coordination, and more detailed discussions of partnerships and alliances, technical and otherwise, were explored where partners see mutual benefit toward prospective approaches to quantifying and managing risk and opportunity in global food systems. Exiting the meeting, meeting participants and non-attending partners will work toward mobilizing aligned assets and commitments to set up more ordered approaches to describing and managing the dynamics of food systems, viewed more holistically as sets of nested geospatially and temporally explicit processes. Specific follow-up actions, deals and meetings will promote our shared vision and commitments toward more innovative and effective approaches to mitigating risks of failures in food systems, and developing opportunities across scales to steer local and global food systems toward outcomes of sufficiency, prosperity and stability within long term resource limits.