The UK food system requires transformational change to cope with the societal and environmental challenges it faces. We're combining the latest food system understanding with foresight capability to provide policy and practice guidance on improving food system resilience.
Our work
The UK food system faces multiple challenges. Poor diets are contributing to obesity and related health problems, and unsustainable production is driving biodiversity loss, soil degradation, pollution, water scarcity and climate change in the UK and overseas. Meanwhile stresses and shocks including climate change, Covid-19 and Brexit have highlighted the need for enhanced foresight and greater food system resilience.
Transformational change is needed, but this must balance with complex trade-offs and competing interests across the food system, particularly as food is the biggest manufacturing sector in the UK with an annual turnover of £105 billion. We need to better understand the relationships within the food system, between the activities and drivers that influence the people undertaking them, and the outcomes of these activities for health, food safety, environment and enterprise, and feedbacks to the drivers.
Our research team will couple the latest food system understanding with emerging foresight capability, and synthesise this knowledge, distil key messages and derive new insights for policy and practice on how to enhance food system resilience and safety to shocks and stresses. We will map food systems to identify trade-offs and synergies, and underpin the work with CPD training in food systems thinking, practice and competence based on the IFSTAL programme.
The work will be delivered by a consortium from the Food Systems Transformation Group at ECI and the Agrifood Group at the University of York.
