Enhancing Food Security and Sovereignty in a Changing Climate
How communities are sustaining local food systems and encouraging food education and literacy to support resilience in the face of climate change.
By Alex Bland
Published Jan 20, 2026
Canada’s agrifood system is vulnerable. Changing climate patterns, including warming temperatures, reduced precipitation, and more frequent and severe weather events will impact food production, processing, distribution, and consumption nationwide. Canada exports and imports raw and prepared food from a multitude of other countries, and while the impacts of climate change may be felt more strongly in different regions, the ripple effects on Canada’s food system will be significant.
Climate Change and our Food Systems
The effects of climate change on our food systems will not be distributed equally, with the most significant impacts likely experienced by Canada’s northern population and Indigenous Peoples. Similarly, rural and remote communities across the country, which are more likely to depend on resource-based economies and interact more closely with nature, face unique challenges related to food security and sovereignty.
Examples of this impact include increased chemical and bacterial contamination through flood waters, decreased ice thickness, which will impact the procurement of culturally important Indigenous food sources, and higher temperatures and increased wildfires threatening crop production.1
The mechanism by which climate change affects food systems and, consequently, human health is complex. Climate-related food system disruptions, which impact food availability, as well as the direct physical impacts of climate on our nutrition and susceptibility to food-borne illnesses, are further compounded by the mental health impacts of food insecurity.2
Food security and food sovereignty are topics that have arisen from the need to better understand and define people’s and communities’ experiences in the face of these challenges.
Food Security
The BC Centre for Disease Control defines food security as:
“everyone [having] equitable access to food that is affordable, culturally preferable, nutritious and safe; everyone has the agency to participate in, and influence food systems; and that food systems are resilient, ecologically sustainable, socially just, and honour Indigenous food sovereignty.” 3
Toronto’s Metropolitan University defines food security through the Five A’s: 4,
- Availability: Sufficient food for all people at all times
- Accessibility: Access, both physical and economic, to food at all times
- Adequacy: Access to food that is both nutritious and safe and produced in environmentally conscious ways
- Acceptability: Access to culturally acceptable food
- Agency: Policies and processes that enable food security
Food Sovereignty
The term food sovereignty was coined in 1996 by La Via Campesina, a global movement of small-scale farmers, and is defined as:
“The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” 5
This approach prioritizes the needs of those who produce, distribute, and consume food rather than those of the markets and corporations and includes an acknowledgement of the needs of future generations.
Shifting our Approach
Re-centring the dialogue to focus on local food systems, nutritional education, and community support can help us rethink our current system. Locally produced food can fill market gaps and make our food systems more resilient to shocks from climate change. This is particularly timely as we are seeing the rise of the local farming movement and the growth of local food systems.
Despite these steps forward, small and medium-scale farmers face significant red tape within a system that favours large-scale food production. This challenge is compounded further by limited access for local farmers to reach consumers and retail opportunities. From these challenges emerges an opportunity to strengthen our regional food systems, particularly in rural areas that operate on a smaller scale.
Rural communities in Canada are a hub of innovation and resourcefulness. By highlighting the work taking place across the province in the food security and sovereignty space, we hope to make this complex issue more digestible.
In this chapter, we outline how food security initiatives can be implemented in rural communities to address community needs while prioritizing sustainable land use and community-based food sovereignty. The chapter builds on the recommendations in the first volume and provides case studies from rural BC communities that have implemented innovative strategies to address food security, sovereignty, and sustainability.
Ultimately, we hope these programs can guide other communities in implementing or expanding their local food programs. If you would like to read more about the theoretical foundations of food security and sovereignty in the rural Canadian context, please visit Chapter 8 of V.1.
Kamloops Food Policy Council
Explore how Canada’s longest-standing independent food policy council is contributing to public policy, advocating for local food sovereignty, and building grassroots community capacity. Read Full Case Study →Nanaimo Foodshare
Learn about how NFS is addressing the root causes of food insecurity and advocating for long-term sustainability in their community. Read Full Case Study →Tea Creek
Read about Tea Creek’s mission to revitalize Indigenous food sovereignty through land-based, culturally safe, Indigenous-led learning. Read Full Case Study →References
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- Harper, S. L., Schnitter, R., Fazil, A., Fleury, M., Ford, J., King, N., Lesnikowski, A., McGregor, D., Paterson, J., Smith, B., Neufeld, H. T.”Food Security and Food Safety.” In Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate: Advancing our Knowledge for Action, edited by Health Canada, Ottawa, ON: Government of Canada, 2022. https://changingclimate.ca/site/assets/uploads/sites/5/2021/11/8-FOOD-CHAPTER-EN.pdf ref=”#ref-1″>↩
- Schnitter R, Berry P. “The Climate Change, Food Security and Human Health Nexus in Canada: A Framework to Protect Population Health.” International Journal of Environmental Research Public Health 16 no. 14 (2019): 2531. doi: 10.3390/i jerph16142531. PMID: 31315172; PMCID: PMC6678521
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- BC Centre for Disease Control. Food Security.Vancouver, BC, 2022. https://www.bccdc.ca/our-services/programs/food-security ↩
- Centre for Studies in Food Security. The Five A’s of Food Security. Toronto: Toronto Metropolitan University, 2019. https://www.torontomu.ca/foodsecurity/ ↩
- La Via Campesina. Food Sovereignty. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://viacampesina.org/en/what-is-food-sovereignty/ ↩