Damehood for Professor E.J. Milner-Gulland in King’s Birthday Honours
The Director of three Oxford Martin School programmes is one of six members of Oxford University recognised in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours list.
How we produce and consume food has a huge bearing on multiple environmental problems including biodiversity loss, deforestation, climate change, water scarcity, and water pollution.
However, today, there is a major lack of comparable information about the environmental impacts of different food products produced using different practices:
Without this information, the foundations for creating sustainable food supply-chains are missing.
The Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability Analytics has created a data structure, data platform, and toolkit to calculate environmental impacts to help address these challenges. These are available via the HESTIA website and the Farm Sustainability Toolkit website. The programme has been supported by WWF-UK.
Now, with further funding from the Login5 Foundation we are scaling up our work and making this digital infrastructure available to farmers, other actors in the food supply chain, and researchers through a number of partnerships with digital farm tools and research institutions. We are also testing how much our analytical toolkit can change farmer behaviour by undertaking ambitious randomised controlled trials with farmers in multiple countries.
Visit HESTIA Visit the Farm Sustainability ToolkitHESTIA – Harmonized Environmental Storage and Tracking of the Impacts of Agriculture – is an online platform to enable the sharing of food sustainability data in a structured, open source and standardised way.
It collects the environmental impact data of everything from apples to zucchinis, from greenhouse- to pasture-based production. It puts the latest research findings across the agricultural supply-chain into the hands of other researchers, farmers, other businesses in the food supply-chain, and organisations that can drive positive environmental action.
Visit HESTIA nowDigital Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture
Agriculture is the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, water scarcity and pollution, pesticide toxicity. It is also a major contributor to climate change. Despite this, today, very few farms measure their environmental impacts. Without this, neither farmers nor policymakers can make informed decisions about how to act.
The Farm Sustainability Toolkit sits at the cutting edge of food sustainability research. By providing digital tools with methods, models, and data, we aim to help farmers monitor and reduce their environmental impacts at a global scale. Working at scale, we can harness the potential of digital tools to revolutionise the food system.
Get the Farm Sustainability ToolkitThe Director of three Oxford Martin School programmes is one of six members of Oxford University recognised in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours list.
The HESTIA project, hosted between the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Biology, has received a donation from the Ardevora Charitable Trust. The funding will support research into the environmental impacts of arable farming and aquaculture, as well as pesticide toxicity
Organisations making their catering more sustainable can make genuine positive contributions, though it will take extremely ambitious action to come close to fully mitigating biodiversity loss.
There is an urgent need to substantially reduce the environmental impacts of the global agricultural system while ensuring sufficient food for an estimated population of 10 billion by 2050.
Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Food Sustainability Analytics
Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity
Postdoctoral researcher at the Beijer Intistitute of Ecological Economics and Stockholm Resilience Centre
Lead Developer
Data Lead
Project Coordinator
Data Analytics Lead
Software Engineer
Project Delivery Manager
Research Assistant (Agri-Environmental Data)
Agri-Environmental System Modelling Consultant
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