Category: Climate Change

How resilient is our food supply? What practical steps can we take to become more resilient to food supply disruption? Rachel Tuckett tells us how the Dyfed Powys Civil Food Resilience Project is working collaboratively with people across the region to answer these questions.

What Is Food Resilience? 

For decades, the UK’s understanding of food resilience has been dominated by questions of supply. Government-level thinking has tended to focus on whether the supply chains are robust, how logistical pinch-points can be eased and whether imports will continue to arrive on time. 

But this supply-side focus is increasingly recognised as only part of the story. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw only too clearly that food resilience is about the demand side too: food supply can be intact, but access to that food may be compromised by inability to travel ‘the final mile’, by socially induced panic buying, or by swiftly changing food prices. Recent work by Professor Tim Lang challenges the supply-side focus directly. His 2025 report to the UK’s National Preparedness Commission makes the case for ‘civil food resilience’, a resilience that is primarily about people. He explores questions of access, distribution, and the capacity of communities themselves to withstand food shocks.

In other words, food resilience is both systemic and civil. It includes: 

• Supply chains – how food is grown, processed, transported, and stocked. 
• Distribution and logistics – how food reaches shops, schools, hospitals, food banks, and households. 
• People and communities – how prepared we are, individually and collectively, to adapt when shocks occur. 

This shift in thinking reframes food resilience as a whole-system challenge involving everyone – government, producers, suppliers, community groups, and households.

The Current State of Food Resilience in the UK 

The UK’s food system is built on a fragile just–in–time model. At any point, major urban centres like London are estimated to hold as little as 24 hours of food. While rural regions may look different, they remain deeply dependent on long, centralised supply chains. 

The UK typically imports around 60% of its food, much of it from regions already experiencing climate disruption. This reliance means that droughts, floods, pests, and shifting growing seasons overseas quickly translate into gaps on our shelves and price increases at home. 

And a changing climate is only one type of risk. Our food system faces multiple vulnerabilities: 

• Cyberattacks on logistics networks 
• Labour shortages, as starkly demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Energy disruptions affecting refrigeration, transport, and processing 
• Extreme weather impacts on crops, transport routes, and access 
• Food safety incidents requiring rapid response 

Industry professionals consistently describe the system as “more fragile than we readily admit.” Tim Lang’s research, based on interviews across the food sector, highlights how awareness of that fragility has grown but action has lagged far behind. 

What Risks Are Today’s Food Systems Under? 

Risk is no longer hypothetical. People across the UK have already experienced: 

• Flooding cutting off transport routes 
• Storm–related power cuts disrupting refrigeration and access 
• Pandemic-related supply chain breakdowns 
• Media and social media increasing panic-buying likelihood 
• Price volatility driven by geopolitical tension and climate impacts 

These events are neither extreme nor unlikely. They are recurring, sometimes compounding, and unevenly distributed across regions. What remains unknown is not whether further shocks will come, but where, when, and how they will intersect. 

A resilient food system must therefore be able to cope with multiple overlapping stresses – not just isolated incidents. 

The Local Scenario: Food Resilience in Dyfed-Powys 

The Dyfed-Powys region (Powys, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire) demonstrates a unique double identity in the food system. We’re both at the beginning and the end of the supply chain.  

On one hand, communities in Powys, Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, and Pembrokeshire sit at the end of very long supply chains. Food must enter the UK, reach national distribution centres, navigate regional logistics networks, and then travel considerable distances to reach rural stores – after which many residents must still travel significant distances to get it. 

On the other hand, the region is rich in food production, from livestock to horticulture. Yet much of this locally produced food, particularly meat and dairy, is exported with only a fraction retained for local consumers. This is beginning to prompt serious discussions within Welsh Government and local partnerships about shortening supply chains and keeping more locally produced food available for local people. 

During the pandemic, mutual aid groups sprang up across the region. Communities mobilised food deliveries, supported vulnerable neighbours, and improvised new distribution channels. These experiences demonstrated both the weaknesses of the existing system and the power of organised civil action. 

A Welsh Opportunity: Regional Food Partnerships and New Government Investment 

Wales is uniquely well positioned to lead a transformation in food resilience. Every one of its 22 counties has a local food partnership, formal structures that bring together growers, distributors, community organisations, councils, and citizens to collaborate on food system change. 

In 2025, Welsh Government published the Wales Community Food Strategy, setting out a vision for a fairer, more resilient, and more sustainable food system. To support its implementation, it launched the Collaborative Grant Scheme for Local Food Partnerships, enabling partnerships to work together on shared challenges and opportunities. 

While the funding emerged partly from underspend, its impact has been significant. Crucially, it has empowered regions to: 

• Build collaborative projects 
• Share learning and innovation 
• Strengthen local infrastructure 
• Explore new models of localised food resilience 

The Dyfed-Powys region seized this opportunity, forming a collaboration between Powys, Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, and Pembrokeshire. Inspired by Tim Lang’s work, they asked ‘How can we turn these national findings into practical action at regional level?’. 

The Dyfed Powys Civil Food Resilience Project 

The regional collaboration commissioned two major strands of research: 

1. Research by Miller Research – a rapid but wide-ranging analysis of food resilience across the region. 
2. A participatory innovation process led by CAT’s Innovation Lab – gathering diverse voices from across the food system to test, challenge, and deepen the research findings. 

The event hosted at CAT formed the heart of this participatory approach. Around 70 participants attended two workshops (one online and one in person), representing the entire food system: 

• Growers and farmers 
• Wholesalers and logistics professionals 
• Retailers 
• Food banks and community food groups 
• Policy makers and local authorities 
• Researchers and educators 

The aim was twofold: 

1. Understand the Current State 

Participants examined the findings from Miller Research, discussing where vulnerabilities lie today and which groups are most exposed. 

2. Explore Future Scenarios 

Using CAT’s Innovation Lab methodology, participants worked through plausible shock scenarios—power cuts, extreme weather, supply disruptions, labour shortages—and assessed what readiness (or lack thereof) looks like on the ground. 

The energy in the room was powerful. Many participants said it was the first time they had been able to speak openly about the real risks facing the food system. The process surfaced: 

• High levels of local expertise 
• Shared concerns across sectors 
• Real appetite for coordinated regional action 
• Examples of missed opportunities to link local production with local need 
• Concrete barriers that communities face in accessing food during shocks 

Perhaps most importantly, it highlighted the enormous potential of civil food resilience – the capacity already present in communities, if supported and connected.

What happened following the workshop at CAT 

On 16 March, the four local food partnerships met at a Food Security Summit in Aberystwyth to share findings from the research and innovation lab workshops, gather wider input, and begin shaping a roadmap for regional action. 

Although the current project runs only until the end of the financial year, there is strong ambition to secure additional investment. The hope is to: 

• Implement recommendations from the research 
• Strengthen local food distribution networks 
• Build long-term collaboration between counties 
• Test new resilience approaches across more regions 
• Develop civil-led preparedness strategies
• Continue scenario-based planning and innovation

Why was CAT so well placed to support this work? 

Our unique combination of expertise made CAT the ideal convener. 

1. Innovation Lab Methodology 

CAT has deep experience designing participatory, whole-systems processes that help diverse groups navigate complexity. This was the primary reason the partners approached CAT for the ability to bring people together in a constructive, structured, and empowering way.  

Click here to learn more about CAT’s Innovation Lab 

2. A History of Food in CAT’s Sustainability Vision 

Food has long played a role in CAT’s thinking – from the early community who lived and grew food on site, to the development of postgraduate programmes in food systems and sustainability. 

Learn more about CAT’s MSc in Sustainable Food and Natural Resources programme 

3. A Physical Space Designed for Collaboration 

CAT’s site provides an environment where people can think differently, step out of day-to-day pressures, and work collectively on long-term challenges.

Learn more about CAT’s on-site educational offer

In the words of James Baldwin, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced”. Renowned writer, researcher and keynote speaker at our upcoming annual conference, Mike Berners-Lee reflects on how we can face the failure of climate action to date, what we can do about it, and on how CAT has helped serve as inspiration.

CAT was where, as a teenager, I encountered my first straw house; first compost loo and probably my first wind turbine. I went back several times for inspiration over the next few years. So it was wonderful to be back again in November for the first time in over a decade, and to have a chance to talk about my book to an audience that really cares about the issues I’m trying to address.

I wrote A Climate of Truth because I’d been working on climate and sustainability for a couple of decades, and in that time, I had seen the world accelerating in the wrong direction. This was despite all my efforts, and the efforts of so many others – many of them absolute heroes in my eyes.

But between us all, we have to face the fact that humanity is degrading climate and nature by a larger amount every year. I’m not saying this to be depressing but because, in the words of James Baldwin, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced”.

By facing our failure to date, we give ourselves a dramatically higher chance of doing better in the future. In fact, we can turn that failure into the essential learning that paves the way to doing much better.

The National Emergency Briefing on Climate and Nature

Just after my talk at CAT, I chaired the National Emergency Briefing on Climate and Nature at the Central Hall in Westminster. We brought together around 1,000 people, including 15% of all MPs and a similar number of peers. We put them in front of nine briefings from some of the UK’s, or even the world’s, top experts in their fields. They heard about crises in nature, climate, tipping points; the implications for extreme weather, food insecurity, health, and national security – not just globally, but right here in the UK.

Paul Behrens looked at our food and farming system and what actions we can take to be future-fit. The climate that gave us reliable harvests is gone – three of the five worst cereal harvests on record have occurred this decade. A food system transformation is unavoidable – and beneficial. By leading the transition now we can avoid being forced into it later by food shocks, rising prices and instability.

A running theme was how everything is connected to everything else, and part of the power of the event was to join the issues together. The biggest threat to the economy comes not from single elements of the polycrisis or individual events, but from how these are likely to reinforce each other.

We heard from Professor Hugh Montgomery that the main health threat turns out not to be from heat strokes, but arises because in a collapsed economy, there is no health service. The national security threat arises from an increasingly desperate world. Another theme was the central role of misinformation in blocking our progress so far.

Facing the problem

There were some very stark messages, but the overall sense was one of rising excitement in the room. Was that weird? Not really. Here’s why.

Firstly, there was a widespread sense of relief to have the problem looked fully in the eye; by doing so, we transformed it from something too awful to look at into something we could take on. Most people get it, deep down, that our society and our politics is heading in the wrong direction and largely ignoring the problem, so it was refreshing to hear this called out.

Secondly, everyone in the room saw how everyone else also understood what was going on. When I asked for a show of hands to see who thought the problem was as serious as they’d heard, who thought it was worse, and who thought it had been exaggerated, not a single hand went up to say that things had been exaggerated. The same thing happened at CAT. In fact, it is the same picture at every talk I do, to every kind of audience. There is robust evidence to say that all over the world, most people want to see far more action on climate change, but they don’t realise that the people around them feel the same. This leads to everyone waiting for everyone else to make the first move.

The third reason for so much energy in the room was a sense that, despite our failure so far, there is real hope that we can do better.

How can we do better?

To do so, a top priority is to put straight the misinformation that has been blocking almost everything. As Hugh Montgomerry said, drawing on his years running emergency responses in a central London hospital; “I know what an emergency looks like. This is one, but we are not treating it like one.”

So the immediate call to action is for a government-backed national information campaign on the climate and nature emergency. Every MP can sign up to this, and everyone reading this piece can urge their MP to support that campaign. Please do go to www.NEBriefing.org to see how you can help.

A film is also being produced, and workshops and film screenings will be taking place up and down the UK. Please feel very free to help organise one of these events as well.

Inspiring action

This takes me back to the central message of my book. If we want to start getting somewhere on the issues that matter most for humans in 2026; climate, nature, inequality, health, AI, democracy and much, much more, we need to understand the reasons behind the reasons why, for example, 30 climate COPs have failed to stop the rate of emissions from rising as if those conferences had never happened.

Why did we almost open up a new coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria when the arguments for it were not just wrong but knowingly bogus? Why are we talking about new oil and gas fields in the North Sea? Why has the global plastics treaty got nowhere?

The common thread is dishonesty in our politics, media and businesses. Examples include industry lobbying and misinformation, a press largely owned by nefarious billionaires who use their platform to talk the public into doing things in support of their own vested interests, and politicians who have routinely got away with saying things (not just lies) which are intended to make the public believe things that they themselves don’t believe to be the case.

We have to lay down some principles of what honesty looks like in public life and insist on them as baseline standards. If a politician misleads us once, it tells us all we ever need to know about their fitness for the role. If a media source is owned by a billionaire with a nefarious track record, that is all you need to know not to trust it.

In the UK, and elsewhere, we have been careless over standards of honesty in public life and the media. As a result, we now face a flat out fight against fascism. The US has lost that fight, with dark repercussions for years ahead. But in the UK, we still stand on the brink with everything to play for. We need to wake up now.

When I first encountered CAT, it was a source of huge inspiration to me as the cutting edge of green technology. CAT has transformed wonderfully, into not just a place of green technology, but into a centre of cutting-edge future thinking. It continues to inspire future generations.

If you are reading this article, it is because you care about this stuff. If you haven’t already, please do roll up your sleeves to face the emergency.

About the author

Mike Berners-Lee is a professor at Lancaster University, the founder of Small World Consulting and the author of books including There is No Planet B and A Climate of Truth. He is also a keynote speaker at CAT’s 2026 Conference.