The creation of bustling, thriving regional economies is an enormous opportunity to create food system resilience - and to bring wealth and wellbeing to rural areas.

To do this we need infrastructure - and we need the finance to support the rebuilding and the re-establishing of that infrastructure.

A new report from the Place Finance Lab addresses these issues.

ffinlo Costain is joined by the report authors and founding partners of the Place Finance Lab: Tamara Giltsoff and Matteo Vanzini, and by report contributor Matthew Thomson, a director of Sustainable Food Cornwall.

The Place Finance Lab has been incubated at Climate KIC, which has also supported this podcast - Climate KIC is Europe’s leading climate innovation agency and community, creating climate-resilient communities and fighting climate breakdown by mobilising systems change in countries, regions, cities, and businesses. Together with partners across the globe, Climate KIC orchestrates solutions and facilitates learning to bridge the gap between climate commitments and current reality, driving faster and more ambitious action.

ffinlo Costain is joined by Martin Lines (Chief Exec NFFN), Nic Renison from Renison's Farm, and by Jenna Hegarty, Head of Policy at Nature Friendly Farming Network.We find out what's happening at Papley Grove in June - we discuss farm business resilience in the face of climate change - Nic talks about her farm and what it's like living under the Helm Wind - and Jenna presents NFFN's new report, The Nature of Business: Delivering resilience, food security and economic value through nature-friendly farming.

This is the third of our programmes investigating Pathways - a 5-year EU Horizon 2020-funded research project that's been running since 2021.

We discuss the scenarios work that provided the foundations for Pathways.

These were designed as plausible future storylines for how European livestock systems might evolve under different economic, environmental, technological, and social conditions. In particular, they helped researchers to test trade-offs between different sustainability goals and outcomes.

ffinlo Costain is joined by Pierre-Marie Aubert, director of agriculture and food policies at the French think tank, IDDRI - by Dr Tom Staton, a senior research fellow at the University of Reading - and by Dr Jessica Bosseaux, a postdoctoral research associate, also at the University of Reading.