The Geography Department has been succesful in obtaining highly competitive Horizon Europe funding led by Dr. Katrin Prager on 'Food Provision through Sustainable Farming Systems and Value Chains'
Geography staff Dr. Katrin Prager (PI) and Dr. Flurina Wartmann (Co-I) have been successful in obtaining a Horizon Europe research grant to identify promising transition pathways towards more sustainable agriculture across value chains in different sectors.
The project with the acronym 'VISIONARY' is led by the University of Aberdeen and a consortium of 12 partner organisations across nine countries. It focusses on behaviour of farmers, actors in the value chain such as businesses, manufacturers, processors and retailers, as well as consumers, and how the behaviour of these actors can be influenced to adopt climate neutral, biodiversity friendly production and consumption practices.
VISIONARY wants to make a difference in food system transitions, by identifying what factors underlie the path dependencies and ‘lock-ins’ in current unsustainable food systems, and showing how these can be overcome. The project will focus on existing initiatives that are still niche and small-scale, and investigate the barriers to scaling up and out. By means of experiments, VISIONARY will generate data on the same transition in different contexts (countries and value chains). For these promising transitions, VISIONARY will tackle both, policy and business shifts that are necessary to make a change. The project aims to improve the sustainability of agriculture by promoting those practices in food production systems that are more environmentally friendly,
economically viable and socio-culturally appropriate, and helping to remove the barriers to their adoption.