A new app details where your food comes from — and just how fragile the global food system really is
After founding the Better Planet Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021, Zia Mehrabi, one of a handful of scientists studying the intersection of food insecurity and climate change, soon found himself fielding a steady stream of calls from policymakers and peers. Everyone wanted more quantitative insight into how extreme weather events affect food supply chains and contribute to hunger around the world. But Mehrabi found the economic puzzle difficult to solve due to the limited public information available. What he could readily find mostly analyzed each disruption in isolation, focusing on one specific part of the world. It failed to account for the expansive flow of goods in global markets or the compounding effects of climate change on the supply chain — and it had to be laboriously mined from reports and one-off case studies.
So when the nonprofit Earth Genome, which builds data-driven tools and resources for a more sustainable planet, approached Mehrabi to collaborate on developing his vision for a digital food supply map, he leapt at the chance. When their U.S. prototype... Read more
