Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs

Introduction

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.

Project Objectives

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.
3. Targeting and evaluating tailored solutions with an interdisciplinary modelling framework.

Methodology

The project will enable the identification of the most effective, targeted solutions by considering:

• Trade-offs
• Synergies
• 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.

Background

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.