Scoping Potential Routes to UK Civil Unrest via the Food System: Results of a Structured Expert Elicitation
Jones, A., Bridle, S., Denby, K. , Bhunnoo, R., Morton, D., Stanbrough, L., Coupe, B., Pilley, V., Benton, T., Falloon, P., Matthews, T. K., Hasnain, S., Heslop-Harrison, J. S., Beard, S., Pierce, J., Pretty, J., Zurek, M., Johnstone, A., Smith, P., Gunn, N., Watson, M., Pope, E., Tzachor, A., Douglas, C., Reynolds, C. 
ORCID: 0000-0002-1073-7394, Ward, N. S., Fredenburgh, J., Pettinger, C., Quested, T., Cordero, J. P., Mitchell, C., Bewick, C., Brown, C., Brown, C., Burgess, P. J., Challinor, A., Cottrell, A., Crocker, T., George, T., Godfray, C. J., Hails, R., Ingram, J., Lang, T., Lyon, F., Lusher, S., MacMillan, T., Newton, S., Pearson, S., Pritchard, S., Sanders, D., Sanderson Bellamy, A., Steven, M., Trickett, A., Voysey, A., Watson, C., Whitby, D. & Whiteside, K. (2023).
Scoping Potential Routes to UK Civil Unrest via the Food System: Results of a Structured Expert Elicitation.
Sustainability, 15(20),
article number 14783.
doi: 10.3390/su152014783
Abstract
We report the results of a structured expert elicitation to identify the most likely types of potential food system disruption scenarios for the UK, focusing on routes to civil unrest. We take a backcasting approach by defining as an end-point a societal event in which 1 in 2000 people have been injured in the UK, which 40% of experts rated as “Possible (20–50%)”, “More likely than not (50–80%)” or “Very likely (>80%)” over the coming decade. Over a timeframe of 50 years, this increased to 80% of experts. The experts considered two food system scenarios and ranked their plausibility of contributing to the given societal scenario. For a timescale of 10 years, the majority identified a food distribution problem as the most likely. Over a timescale of 50 years, the experts were more evenly split between the two scenarios, but over half thought the most likely route to civil unrest would be a lack of total food in the UK. However, the experts stressed that the various causes of food system disruption are interconnected and can create cascading risks, highlighting the importance of a systems approach. We encourage food system stakeholders to use these results in their risk planning and recommend future work to support prevention, preparedness, response and recovery planning.
| Publication Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Publisher Keywords: | food systems; global catastrophic risk; climate change; extreme weather; ecological collapse; scenarios; cascading risks |
| Subjects: | G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform |
| Departments: | School of Health & Medical Sciences > Healthcare Services Research & Management > Food Policy |
| SWORD Depositor: |
Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution International Public License 4.0.
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