Description du projet
Tracer l’empreinte environnementale de la production alimentaire
La production alimentaire est vitale pour l’humanité, mais elle cause d’importants dommages à l’environnement. Au cours des 60 dernières années, un développement rapide et inégal a mis à rude épreuve les limites de la planète. Malgré les progrès réalisés, les impacts antérieurs à 1961 restent mal quantifiés. Le projet WHEP, financé par le CER, s’attaquera à ce problème en retraçant l’empreinte environnementale des aliments et en l’associant à la nutrition humaine depuis 1850. Il vise à quantifier les impacts, à analyser le rôle du commerce et à évaluer les inégalités. Les objectifs de WHEP comprennent la création d’une base de données mondiale, l’estimation des impacts environnementaux, la traçabilité de l’empreinte des produits dans les chaînes commerciales et l’analyse des trajectoires au sein de l’espace d’exploitation sûr et équitable. Cette recherche promet de dévoiler l’histoire de l’impact environnemental de l’alimentation, ouvrant ainsi la voie à des politiques équitables et durables.
Objectif
Food production covers the most basic human need, and simultaneously is the main driver of anthropogenic environmental impacts. These impacts have resulted in the transgression, during the brief period since the industrial revolution, of the planetary boundaries defining the safe operating space of humanity. A rich research literature quantifies the last 60 years’ fast, heterogeneous, and often unfair development in food supply and related environmental impacts, and how these depend on agro-climatic factors, technology, and trade flows, all of which have greatly changed but with different trajectories around the world. However, these developments lack an integrated approach, and are very poorly quantified before 1961. WHEP will bridge these knowledge gaps, assessing “who has eaten the planet” by answering the questions: “What are the environmental impacts of food production since 1850?”, “What is the role of trade in food supply and in displacing the responsibilities for these impacts?” “How are impacts related to planetary boundaries, food supply and inequality?” These highly ambitious goals are addressed by four objectives: 1) Constructing a consolidated global country-level annual database on agricultural production and management, using massive data collation in combination with modelling; 2) Estimating the environmental impacts: greenhouse gas emissions and carbon, land, water, nitrogen, and phosphorus through spatially explicit, integrated, dynamic modelling; 3) Calculating product footprints and tracing them along international trade chains; and 4) Analyzing the observed trajectories in the safe and just operating space, by assessing the drivers, and how impacts at the production and consumption levels are related to fair and healthy supply. This ground-breaking research will shed new light on the environmental history of food, opening up many new research frontiers, and providing necessary information to design fair and sustainable policies.
Champ scientifique
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsInstitution d’accueil
28006 Madrid
Espagne