Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Food Systems (CESFS)

Excellent food system science to improve health and the environment

The world is undergoing the fastest rates of change it has seen since humans began to dominate land and water use. Underlying these changes are population increases with more and more people living in urban settings. This has raised some major challenges:

• Increasingly complex food system affected by geographical relationships between food production, consumption, and consumer choice
• Urbanised populations are generally detached and uninterested in where their food is produced and how it is processed.

CESFS is helping to address these challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Centre brings together the expertise of academics, and their networks across the UK and globally, in the research areas of consumer behaviour and public policy, crop sciences, genomics, environment and climate change, livestock and animal health and management to:

• Improve human health through what we eat
• Understand choice and enable equitable and fair access
• Support the generation of food that is authentic, safe and nutritious from sustainable systems
• Characterise resilient supply chains that minimise risks to human, animal and plant health and the environment.

The Centre is made up of a multidisciplinary team of experts spanning the fields of health and life sciences, environmental sciences, and policy and management research.