Project description
Innovative solutions for sustainable and healthy food systems
Food systems are crucial to reduce hunger, but they are also causing increasingly severe damage to the environment and human health. The ERC project FLORA will provide essential evidence to identify and implement the necessary shifts in practices and behaviours to transform global agri-food production, trade and consumption towards sustainable and healthy food systems. The project will apply innovative measures of sustainability to diagnose the integrated health and environmental effects of food systems globally from the production and consumption perspectives. FLORA will identify critical threats and opportunities utilising system dynamics and complex network analyses. It will target and assess tailored solutions with an interdisciplinary modelling framework.
Objective
Food systems are crucial to end hunger, but also to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to protect and restore biodiversity, to ensure human health and well-being, to end poverty, and to support sustainable communities. While hunger has receded, food systems are causing increasingly severe damage to our environment and health. The FLORA project will contribute to a transformation of global agri-food production, trade, and consumption necessary to achieve sustainable and healthy food systems.
The project will create essential evidence to identify and implement the shifts in practices and behaviours needed to effectively achieve this transformation, by (1) making a diagnosis of the integrated health and environmental outcomes of food systems globally, from the production and consumption perspectives, with innovative measures of sustainability, (2) identifying key threats and opportunities with system dynamics and complex network analyses, and (3) targeting and evaluating tailored solutions with an inter-disciplinary modelling framework.
The project will enable the identification of most effective, targeted solutions by considering trade-offs, synergies, and dynamics of key food systems components. Global in scope, it sets the ambitious goal to overcome barriers in current approaches by taking a systemic approach and establishing a robust, interdisciplinary framework supported by empirical advancements to tackle complex food systems challenges.
This innovative project builds on the PI’s excellent track record in leading interdisciplinary research focused
on the global agri-food system and its environmental impacts.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental scienceshydrologyecohydrology
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturesustainable agriculture
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencessustainability sciences
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringnatural resources management
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75794 Paris
France