Publication list

Deliverable 11.5: SUSFANS final outcomes workshop on pathways towards a sustainable and food and nutrition secure Europe WP11

In this document, a protocol is provided for the four workshops with stakeholders in the four countries: Denmark, Italy, France, and Czechia.

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Enhanced modelling of sustainable food and nutrition security: the agri-food commodity and nutrient flows and the food supply chains

This deliverable describes the enhanced modelling of agri-food commodity and nutrient flows and representation of the food supply chains and markets in economic models.

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Deliverable 9.5 The SUSFANS toolbox for assessing EU Sustainable food and nutrition security

The SUSFANS toolbox for assessing EU sustainable food and nutrition security provides a multidisciplinary instrument for analysing and monitoring SFNS in the EU, providing a set of mutually consistent indicators and signals for (un)sustainable food (in)secure situations.

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SUSFANS DATA

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SUSFANS Toolbox

SUSFANS presents a novel approach to deliver quantitative foresight on diet change, policy and production system innovations, and assess the potential impact on the sustainability performance of the EU food system: • Include EU-specific nutrition surveillance data (i.e. individual food intake) in a framework for integrated multi-criteria assessment of the EU and global food system, benchmarking national data against a reference sustainable, healthy diet for EU. • Modelling the entire system, including post-harvest food handling & retail, global trade, natural resource use, food loss and waste, and impacts on diets, environment, economy and equity. • Exploring instruments and transformative pathways incl. economic sustainability and equity. • The SUSFANS modelling toolbox comprises of five models: MAGNET (developed by Wageningen Economic Research), SHARP diets (developed by Wageningen University and partners), DIET (developed by Luke and INRA), GLOBIOM & AgriPrice4Cast (developed by IIASA) and CAPRI (developed by Bonn University and EC’s Joint Research Centre). See diagram.

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Methods and Explanation

From raw data to performance metrics Goal of this document is to give a short introduction into the SUSFANS-visualizer: what does it show (section 2) and how is the data constructed (chapter 3). It is also an enclosed descriptive document for the available data (aggregated variables and performance metrics) on the SUSFANS website. The development of the SUSFANS-visualizer is part of the SUSFANS-project having the overall objective to build the conceptual framework, the evidenced base and analytical tools for underpinning EU-wide food policies with respect to their impact on consumer diets and their implications for nutrition and public health in the EU, the environment, the competitiveness of the EU agri-food sectors, and global food and nutrition security. The visualizer is available on https://www.susfans.eu/susfans-visualizer (figure 1).

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Web Visualizer data (ZIP)

Data of the SUSFANS Visualizer.

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Web Visualizer data (XLSX)

Visualizer Data as Part of WP 12.3

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Web data behind the visualizer (XLSX)

The Web data behind the Visualizer (Code)

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Deliverable 10.4: Foresight of EU sustainable food and nutrition security: the interplay between major challenges and policy responses at different spatiotemporal scales

This deliverable reports on Task 10.4. Based on a quantification of a the combinations of future challenges and policies, it delivers summary challenges and efficient policy solutions for the EU sustainable FNS, stakeholder knowledge and priorities to ensure its suitability for decision

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Deliverable 6.3: A systematic analysis of social, economic and environmental sustainability metrics for the range of activities and world views encompassed in the EU food systems

Paper not yet released - SUSFANS proposes a multi-layered index of sustainability metrics for the assessment of the EU food system, food security and dietary habits. Based on a stakeholder-informed scientific attempt to create better insight in and to unveil the complexity of food systems, this report presents one of the core joint results of the SUSFANS research & innovation project. A simple and non-academic interpretation of the highest level of information in the index is provided below.

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Deliverable 11.6: Feasibility and acceptance of SUSFANS Toolbox and results

Stakeholder workshops were held to increase awareness of the SUSFANS project outcomes and willingness to implement and consult the user toolbox in decision-making processes among stakeholders. Four workshops were held in France, Denmark, the Czech Republic, and Italy with in total 110 stakeholders from academia, national policy makers, industry, and NGO’s. We used a combination of general stakeholder workshops and specific group discussions with DEMOCs cards. Because of the complex and abstract structure of the SUSFANS toolboxes, the usability and feasibility outcomes were challenging for the stakeholders to discuss. Therefore, they were given future narratives of possible scenarios in the form of DEMOCS cards that helped workshops participants to come up with innovative ideas and propose further improvement, feasibility and acceptance of the SUSFANS toolboxes. Stakeholders appreciated the structured approach of SUSFANS to define sustainability in its four dimensions: environment, economics, cultural/social, nutrition/health. The SUSFANS visualizer was considered a useful tool to evaluate sustainability impacts of policies and support decision making of public policy makers in a more holistic and evidence based way. The toolbox was considered helpful to facilitate discussions between disciplines, countries, public and private on the health and sustainability outcomes, to have an informed discussion and get people to move. The abstract form of the toolboxes and the complexity, in combination with limited time to digest the provided information left participants with a challenge to foresee the exact application of the toolboxes in their daily practice.

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Deliverable 9.6: The strengths and limitations of the SUSFANS metrics and models for assessing sustainable food and nutrition security in Europe

The SUSFANS model toolbox comprises state-of-the-art foresight and newly developed diet models for a holistic sustainability and dietary assessment. The toolbox is ready to assess the food system transitions to support healthy and sustainable diets of EU citizens. A future research agenda for the modelling of food system properties is proposed regarding modelling of food supply, consumer choices, global impacts and for assessing and communicating complex model results.

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Deliverable 7.5: The SHARP diet model and its application to different EU regions Working document including preliminary results

-This deliverable has not yet been published - The SHARP diet model makes use of individual-level dietary intake data of different EU countries to derive diets that are more environmentally Sustainable, Healthy, Affordable, Reliable, and Preferred by consumers. Options for dietary change are derived from existing efficient diets, hence within the boundaries of current dietary practices and realistic. The SHARP diet model proposes future EU diets that are both healthy and sustainable, and likely to be accepted by consumers #SHARP #die

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Deliverable 5.4: Sustainability impacts of potential innovations in the supply chain of livestock and fish, and fruit and vegetables, and sustainable future diets (Report on T5.4)

To assess different possible future directions for the EU food system, potential innovations were identified towards achieving sustainable healthy diets within the EU. The innovations focused on two cases, the ‘livestock and fish case’ and the ‘fruit and vegetable case’. For both supply chains there are concerns regarding the current European diet (excessive consumption of livestock and too low consumption of fruit, vegetables and seafood). For animal production, i.e. livestock and seafood, environmental concerns (land use, GHG emissions, fish stock depletion etc.) are particularly pressing.

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Deliverable 10.2: Quantified future challenges to sustainable food and nutrition security in the EU

The aim of this paper is to provide a forward looking assessment of the baseline and alternative contextual scenarios in terms of their impacts on the sustainability of European Union's food and nutrition security. Our approach, on the one hand, allows to identify the future challenges and opportunities for the EU agro-food sector, and on the other hand provides a basis against which agro-food policies and innovations can be tested and evaluated in terms of their contribution to sustainable development.

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Newsletter 5

SUSFANS is entering the final phase of the project, the development of (an interactive demo of) the SUSFANS Visualizer as a web-tool has been initiated. It is planned to populate the tool with scenario results from the foresight report, and that we allow users to explore trade-offs between sustainability challenges and possible impact of policy changes or systems innovations. The resulting and already famous toolbox will be presented and discussed on a tour through Europe starting soon. Read more in this newsletter!

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Deliverable 10.3. The potential role of producer and consumer food policies in the EU to sustainable food and nutrition security

The aim of the research presented in SUSFANS D10.3 is threefold: (1) We identify a set of interesting and relevant policies in the areas of EU health and nutrition, agricultural, fisheries, and storage, i.e. market stabilisation, policies. (2) The SUSFANS modelling toolbox is applied. This gives the possibility to test and debug the most recent model developments following from previous SUSFANS work and identify further necessary improvements towards the end of the project. (3) We test the selected policy measures and assess their impacts on the EU agrofood system applying the SUSFANS metrics framework. Our results show, how the assessed policies may impact EU producers and consumers and how these can contribute to improving sustainability in the food system. Different established macro models are applied for the foresight analysis of the various policies. The policies tested are distinct from each other and are not run with all models available in the toolbox. In this sense, the presented research serves as a pre-test for the final foresight work in SUSFANS which will involve combined approaches of policies and models. Nevertheless, our results give already an insight on the directions of impacts as well as on the applicability and quantifiability of the metrics framework.

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Deliverable 7.4: Toward modelling SHARP diets, based on nutritional adequacy, sustainability metrics and population diversity parameters

Diet modelling has been dominated by linear programming models for many years, however their success has been limited, while their inability to extract value from data in our information-driven world has become readily apparent. Increasing consumers’ diet healthiness has been the primary task of almost all diet models, however to actually change patterns of consumers’ purchasing behavior, models have to learn their preferences, so as to recommend diet alternatives that are both healthy, and appealing. We present our data-driven approach that leverages food item similarities as the main building blocks of diet recommendations, which arguably represents a paradigm shift in the way we optimize diets. Furthermore, we switch from exploiting what is known to be preferable (i.e. what we observe in a consumer’s diet), to exploring what is likely preferable, thereby allowing our diet model to “think outside the box”.

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Workshop report: 4 th Stakeholder Core Group Workshop

The Workshop aimed to inspire the consumer oriented way of thinking facilitated by a stepwise approach and introducing the consumer drivers of food and dietary choice into prospective studies on the sustainability of the EU food system. The Workshop also evaluated and prioritized the consumer-oriented innovation pathways on fruit and vegetables in the EU and the project also wanted to receive feedback on the on going foresight work of SUSFANS. Furthermore, the Workshop also aimed to discuss the likely key outputs of the project and how these could be of use to the stakeholders and their organizations. Finally, the project team wanted to discuss with stakeholders how to deliver the outreach work of the project beyond the stakeholder core group itself asking the group to help shaping the key messages of the project to the different stakeholder communities and discussing how the group could play an ambassadorial role for the project.

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