NMBU Sustainability arena: Sustainable food systems

Today's world food systems are centralized around many environmental, economic, and societal challenges. Crises such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine exacerbates the challenges we face. This reveals a need for a more resilient system to feed a growing world population.  

The UN elevated Sustainable Food Systems to the top of the international agenda during the Food System Summit in New York in 2021. In Norway, actors in the national food systems are increasingly judged by their ability to contribute to food security as well as to human and planetary health.  

There is now a broad international consensus that the world's food systems, both local and global, need to go through a “transformation” to meet the UN sustainable development goals, to be able to tackle the current challenges.  

The arena involves all NMBU's seven faculties, as well as various partners from different sectors within research, education and communication. 

Through the production and communication of knowledge, the arena will build a common and transdisciplinary understanding of sustainability in food systems. The arena will work to stimulate transformative change and critical reflection of the current state of the world's food systems.  

The arena will support innovation in food systems thinking across scales from the micro-level (e.g. co-evolution of microbes, animals and food-plants) to the macro-level (e.g. international food trade). Central to the work within the arena will be the overall system approach, including a multitude of knowledge producers to cover the whole food system.  

Working between different sectors and across different levels both internally and externally of the university, the arena will work within research, education, and communication to reach these goals.  

Everything encompassing all actors, food products, as well as economic, societal, and natural environments in which the systems are placed.  

A sustainable food system: «…a food system that delivers food security and nutrition for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised». 

In the arena we will, through different activities, strengthen the ability to deliver knowledge about sustainable food systems, such as organizing seminars, workshops and writing activities.  

The arena will:  

• Work towards establishing a MSc program in Sustainable Food Systems.  
• Collaborate across faculties on teaching and student activities in food system related courses. 
• Provide seed funding for writing workshops aimed at co-publishing across projects/faculties and writing of new grant proposals  
• Organize Sustainable Food System outreach seminars and debates, both digitally and physically.  

If you have any inquiries about the arena, please contact our project coordinator Caroline Karlsson by e-mail: caroline.marie.krisitina.karlsson@nmbu.no 

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