2020 MI Good Food Summit - Stephanie Osborn - Impacts of Climate Change on Southeast MI

Our food system is acutely vulnerable to external pressures. To address this, interdisciplinary collaboration is required to identify pressure points and create resilient communities, especially in the face of increasing climate threats. As graduate students from Wayne State University, we are working to identify and quantify climate change-related vulnerabilities on the procurement and distribution of a representative market basket of goods in Southeast Michigan’s food system. Tools and perspectives from economics, biology, and planning will be used to more fully understand the impacts of climate change and potential leverage points for mitigation and adaptation. After identifying major climate change patterns in the Midwest, we will integrate this data into economic models in order to predict the impact of climate change on our regional food system. From our findings we will develop a vulnerability assessment tool that can serve as a starting point to improve community resilience.