Recent evidence now clearly indicates that human activities, including those of agri-food systems, are exceeding six of the nine planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023; Rockström et al., 2025). Amid these transgressions of Earth's critical support systems, human-caused climate destabilization is driving more frequent and severe events—flood, drought, storms, wildfires, and compound events—that disrupt production and food system infrastructure, and amplify the risks of food insecurity, economic crises, and social instability (IPCC AR6; Richardson et al., 2023; Persson et al., 2022). Anthropogenic climate forcing, interacting with water resource depletion (United Nations University Institute for Water Environment and Health, 2026), accelerating biodiversity loss (Lanz et al., 2018; Cabernard et al., 2024), and agricultural land use intensification, increases the risk of both livestock and human infectious disease by expanding pathogen ranges, degrading disease-regulating ecosystem services, and intensifying wildlife-livestock-human interactions that increase the probability of spillover and outbreak events with potentially global public health consequences (Rohr et al., 2019; Pereira et al., 2025). These global change dynamics are resulting in cascading threats to crop yields, food safety, food security, and human health and wellbeing (Rohr et al., 2019; Webb et al., 2020; Xie et al., 2026).

The likelihood and severity of shocks to global and regional food systems are being shaped not only by biophysical change but also by current political choices in the United States that constrain collective action on climate adaptation and mitigation, disease control, and food insecurity (Locks et al., 2025; Trump, 2025; The White House, 2025). These converging environmental and political realities make achieving food system resilience and disaster preparedness—the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and adapt through shocks—a core societal need with significant implications for research, education, planning policy and evaluation, and directly tied to UN SDG 13: Climate Action (Webb et al., 2020; Miles et al., 2025; Ben Hassen et al., 2025).

Food system resilience is defined as the capacity of an agri-food system to provide sufficient, appropriate, and accessible food to all in the face of unpredictable biophysical, social, or economic disturbances (Tendall et al., 2015; Harris and Spiegel, 2019; Béné, 2020; Blay-Palmer et al., 2021; Zurek et al., 2022; Miles and Hoy, 2023). In this era of overlapping and accelerating crises, including extreme weather events, global pandemics, geopolitical conflict, cuts to disaster response and entitlement programs from national governments, and food price volatility, strengthening agri-food system resilience and disaster preparedness has become an important governance challenge for many nations, states, regions, cities and civil society (IPES-Food, 2023; Ryan et al., 2024; Hardison-Moody et al., 2025; Moore et al.).

These growing pressures are being compounded by rapid, uneven, and multiple shocks transmitted through global commodity chains (Fan et al., 2021) with disproportionate impacts on tens of millions of poor, food insecure, and vulnerable people globally. Over the last decade alone, for example, shocks to global commodity chains affecting food security, nutrition, economics, and public health have increased significantly. Narayan et al. (2024) synthesize the evidence that extreme events, including droughts, floods, heatwaves, storms, and related hazards, drive food insecurity through production losses, damage to critical infrastructure and supply chains, impact to livelihoods, income shocks, and market disruptions that trigger food price spikes and reduced affordability, access, and consumption of quality foods. These impacts on food insecurity are amplified where poverty, conflict, and weak social safety nets already exist, thus disproportionately affecting socio-economically vulnerable populations (Hasegawa et al., 2021; Narayan et al., 2024).

Key examples of global shocks to the agri-food system in the last decade include the COVID-19 pandemic, during which pandemic-related economic disruptions (e.g., widespread income loss and reduced purchasing power) coincided with a sharp increase in moderate or severe food insecurity (UNICEF, 2021). The resulting impact was an increase to a total of 2.37 billion food insecure people in 2020, an estimated 320 million more than the pre-pandemic period in 2019 (UNICEF, 2021). Other large-scale biophysical shocks to food systems include the 2015–2016 El Niño, affecting agriculture, food security, and nutrition for more than 60 million people worldwide (FAO, 2016). Further examples include the 2022 Pakistan mega-flood, which affected 33 million people [Ministry of Planning Development and Special Initiatives (MPDSI), 2022], and the 2023–2024 Southern Africa drought, which the World Food Program estimated created an additional 27 million food insecure people (World Food Programme, 2024). Recent global estimates reveal that about 2.3 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity in 2024, and an estimated 673 million faced hunger (Food Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Fund for Agricultural Development, United Nations Children's Fund, World Food Programme, and World Health Organization, 2025).

Biophysical risks and impacts driven by climate destabilization are expected to accelerate this century because current global commitments are not on track to keep anthropogenic warming below 1.5 °C [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2022]. Instead, current international climate pledges are projected to result in 2.3–2.5 °C of warming by 2100, a level of anthropogenic climate forcing associated with substantially greater impacts on the frequency and intensity of extreme events and heightened risks to food security [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2023; UNEP, 2025; Ripple et al., 2025].

The implications and risks of this rapid and global ecological change are increasingly clear: achieving food system resilience and disaster preparedness is not a sectoral concern, but a cross-cutting societal need and capacity that will depend upon on backing and scaling integrated research, education, planning, policy design, and sustained public investment (Miles and Hoy, 2023), especially where climate change is already intensifying risks to equitable food availability, access, stability and utilization, including post-disaster food insecurity following Hurricane Maria [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019, 2022; Mark et al., 2025].

There is also growing evidence that agri-food systems can be redesigned intentionally to reduce vulnerability, prepare for shocks, and support recovery through policies, programs, and community-based initiatives (Blay-Palmer et al., 2021; Miles and Hoy, 2023; Campbell et al., 2022; McDaniel et al., 2021). While the most successful mechanisms of change continue to be uncovered and many are context-dependent, understanding how resilience can be enhanced and sustained across scales is a key area for research and practice.