AGRIIH Workshop Maps Interdisciplinary Research Opportunities for Agricultural Resilience

On June 2, the Agricultural Resilience Impact and Innovation Hub (AGRIIH) hosted its inaugural workshop at the University of Oxford, bringing together researchers from across disciplines —including colleagues from Biology, Smith School, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford Martin School and Engineering — to explore how interdisciplinary collaboration can strengthen agricultural resilience in the UK and beyond.

 

The one-day event, titled
“Creating a Problem–Solution Oriented Map of Interdisciplinary Research Opportunities for Agricultural Resilience Impact and Innovation”, provided a space for academics to reflect on the meaning of agricultural resilience, share diverse disciplinary perspectives, and identify priority areas for future collaborative research.

 

Participants discussed the multiple dimensions of resilience—ranging from robustness and recovery to adaptation and transformation—and highlighted the need to consider equity, scale, and beyond-human perspectives. A key takeaway was that resilience cannot be predefined but must be co-developed with stakeholders to address real-world complexity.

 

Through a series of structured group sessions, the workshop identified:

Three focal research areas:

  • Healthy people, healthy environments- shaping agriculture to co-address human and planetary health
  • Harnessing technology and business model change- alternative business models that help facilitate integration of technologies and the ‘design’ of cultivated species, with social and ecological approaches to advance resilience
  • Building back ecological complexity- how do we successfully enhance ecological complexity, maintain productivity and incorporate multifunctionality for socially and environmentally just transitions towards resilience.

Two cross-cutting themes

  • Understanding knowledge, power, environment, and institutions that shape agriculture for resilient and inclusive futures.
  • Reconciling approaches and paradigms that produce the greatest resilience and good.

The workshop highlighted the depth and diversity of perspectives brought by participants, reinforcing the importance of truly interdisciplinary approaches to agricultural resilience. Discussions underscored the need to connect insights across natural and social sciences, while actively engaging with stakeholders from farming, industry and policy to ensure relevance and impact.

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AGRIIH was established to catalyse high-impact, interdisciplinary research on agricultural resilience, with a focus on systems thinking, stakeholder co-creation, and real-world application. The Hub is based in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford and collaborates closely with researchers across the University and beyond.