Editorial: Food System Resilience, Disaster Preparedness and Response

This editorial frames food system resilience as the capacity of an agri-food system to provide sufficient, appropriate, and accessible food despite biophysical, social, or economic disturbances. It is useful because it moves beyond general resilience language and identifies concrete capacities that can be strengthened in policy and practice. The article synthesizes the literature into a set of key attributes, including food system awareness, diversity, redundancy, and coordination. It also emphasizes that resilience is not a single intervention but a portfolio of organizational, infrastructural, ecological, and political capacities that must be built over time and tested during disruption. For practitioners, the most actionable value lies in the editorial’s emphasis on scenario planning, advanced preparation, backup logistics, and equitable governance. It highlights the importance of robust infrastructure and contingency planning across transport, water, and supply chains, as well as the need for genuine partnership with Indigenous and place-based knowledge systems. The article also stresses that inequities shape both vulnerability and response, meaning resilience planning must account for who bears the costs of shocks and whose knowledge informs recovery. Although it is an editorial rather than an original field trial, it provides a current synthesis of how resilience is being conceptualized in food systems research and what capabilities matter for preparedness and response. The article is most relevant to researchers, policy designers, and system planners looking to translate resilience thinking into operational priorities, especially in contexts where climate stress, market disruption, and social inequity overlap.