The Mission
The sustainable production of a sufficient amount of safe and nutritious food is of vital and increasing importance. Yet our food systems also play important roles in other areas besides supplying healthy foods – such as the provision of ecosystem services, employment opportunities, or the delivery of biogenic resources for other material use or energy supply.
In order to ensure and enhance such
functionality in the long run, however, our prevailing food systems need to be
transformed. Unsustainable agricultural production practices contribute to the
global challenges such as climate change or the decline of biodiversity and
threaten future usability of agricultural lands. Simultaneously, many problems
are still caused by under-, mal-, and overnutrition across the globe. To be
able to tackle such challenges transformation needs to occur at all levels:
from local to global, and addressing environmental, social, and economic
aspects in our food systems.
To do ‘our part’ in this matter, different
researchers at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences have come together to
form a research group and combine forces to foster applied inter-disciplinary
research on sustainable food systems. Topics range from sustainable primary
production and utilisation of biogenic raw materials, the protection and
conservation of natural resources as well as securing human nutrition and
health at the interface of life, engineering and social sciences. Taken
together, we hope that our research will contribute to the innovations needed
to increase the resilience and circularity within our food systems and help safeguard
our living environment for future generations.
