This talk will explore how the world can provide a healthy diet for upwards of 10 billion people by mid-century without major negative effects on the environment. It will ask the degree to which action needs to occur on the production (growing and raising more food) and consumption (diet change) sides. It will also explore some of the major challenges for food security – the ability of people to access affordable food – and what might be done about it.
Watch a recording of the seminar.
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Professor Sir Charles Godfray, director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, is a population biologist with broad interests in the environmental sciences and has published in fundamental and applied areas of ecology, evolution and epidemiology. He is interested in how the global food system will need to change and adapt to the challenges facing humanity in the 21stcentury, and in particular in the concept of sustainable intensification, and the relationship between food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity.
He chaired the Lead Expert Group of the UK Government’s Foresight Project on the Future of Food and Farming and is a member of the Strategy Advisory Board of the UK Global Food Security Programme and the Steering Group of the UK Government Green Food Project. He is also a member of the writing team for the UN’s Committee on World Food Security, High Level Panel of Experts report on Climate Change and Food Security.
Biography
Professor Godfray read Zoology at Oxford between 1976 & 1979, moving to the Imperial College London campus at Silwood Park to do a PhD supervised by Val Brown in insect community ecology. He remained at Imperial for three years on NERC & AFRC post-doctoral fellowships (taking six months leave to work for the then Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control on a practical pest management problem in the Philippines, Fiji & Malaysia) and then returned to Oxford 1985-7 as Departmental Demonstrator in Ecology. In 1987, he joined the staff at Imperial and remained there until 2006, eventually becoming the Head of the Biology Division. From 1999 to 2006, he was also Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology at Imperial. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2001, and in 2006 joined the Zoology Department at Oxford as Hope Professor of Zoology (Entomology), a position associated with Jesus College. He is also Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food at Oxford University.