Community Resilience Innovations in Food Security and Health: Towards Resilient Recovery from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Asia-Pacific region is hit by many typhoons and floods each year, as well as occasional fires, earthquakes, floods, and droughts. Food security in the region’s urban-rural poor communities is negatively impacted by the damage and losses caused by natural disasters on the livelihood of farmers, fisher folk and other vulnerable groups such as informal settlers in the urban areas. During the COVID-19 pandemic, mitigating these impacts has become more complicated, particularly among vulnerable and marginalized communities. In many developing economies, 60 percent of employment, is provided by the informal sector where conditions of work are not highly remunerative nor very desirable (ILO, 2009). In many cities in the region, about 40-60 percent derive their income and livelihood from the informal economy. The COVID-19 pandemic coupled with climate disasters exacerbated the adverse impacts brought about to our already fragile health, social and political economic systems. It also highlighted the uncertainties we face as a nation when calamities, social-political conflicts, accelerations in technology and climate change intersect.

The twin crisis of our time, climate crisis and rising social inequalities have exacerbated the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This session invites papers that address the food, energy and water security needs of vulnerable populations, i.e. women, children, and elderly, that are collaboratively forged by national/local governments in partnership with the CSOs/CBOs and private sector. It also encourages papers with a human rights perspective in examining community investments of human, capital and infrastructural resources for reducing vulnerabilities to climate risks.