Currently, the agriculture, forestry and land use change sectors account for about 25% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If the current trends of global food and animal production and consumption are maintained then a further increase of GHG emissions by 80% could occur by 2050.

Ensuring food and nutrition security in the long-term, while containing global warming within 1.5 or 2 °C, will require a societal-level and systemic transformation of our current-day, predominantly short-term vision of food systems. This will also necessitate a change in culture, including the transformation of education and training, and an overall change in consumption patterns and citizen’s behaviour.

Due to the complexity of food systems their societal and systemic transformation requires a holistic approach. Moreover, the development of a joint vision on resilient and sustainable food systems means that all stakeholders should be actively involved and that a multi-disciplinary approach has to be followed to identify synergies and trade-offs between all three dimensions of sustainability (i.e. social, environmental and economic).

A new ERA-Net Cofund on Food Systems and Climate (FOSC)

The partners FACCE-JPI, Belmont Forum, and LEAP-Agri set the foundations of FOSC the new ERA-Net Cofund on Food Systems and Climate. The aim of FOSC is to implement a range of joint activities that contribute to the creation of a strong and effective trans-national European-African-Latin American research and innovation network and the better coordination and synergizing of national, international and EU research programmes relevant to food security under climate change evolution.

The FOSC Consortium consists of 28 partners from Europe, Africa and Latin America and with the support of the European Commission. Ultimately, FOSC contributes to the creation of a strong and effective transnational research and innovation network for the better coordination and synergy of national, international, and European research projects that are relevant to food security under climate change.

The focus of FOSC research will be on assessing the impact of climate change on food and nutrition security as well as on the design of more sustainable and resilient food systems in Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Second Call 2021: Innovative solutions for resilient, climate-smart and sustainable food systems

This call of the two ERA-NETs FOSC and SUSFOOD2 was announced in Spring 2021 and closed, after a one-stage procedure, on the 16^th of August 2021, with 31 research proposals successfully submitted.

First Call 2019: Knowledge base on Food Systems and Climate

The FOSC call was pre-announced on November 4^th and launched on December 20^th. The call is funded by 25 institutions of 21 countries from 3 continents and the European Commission. A total of 17 projects were selected for funding. The projects started in June 2021.

Kick-off meeting projects of the first Call

The FOSC projects kicked-off with a 2-day workshop on 15 and 16 June 2021, hosted by the Hungarian Ministry of Agriculture and co-organized by Wageningen Research from the Netherlands. The 17 funded projects under the 2019 call work on research that contributes to resilient and sustainable food systems under climate change. This translates into diverse research themes including novel farming techniques, crop and soil improvement, modelling on regional and inter-continental food chains, integrated production systems and the reduction of food waste.