The UB hosts an international forum on food sustainability
PRESS RELEASE
- From 8 to 12 September, the University of Barcelona and the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technologies are organizing the international conference LCA FOOD 2024, a leading scientific summit that will address the challenges of achieving a more sustainable, healthy and fair food system in all parts of the world.
Establishing a healthier, more sustainable and socially fair food system is a pending challenge worldwide. This challenge is linked to changes such as more sustainable lifestyles, better eating habits and choices, new industrial-scale production models, more efficient use of natural resources, responsible consumption and waste reduction to avoid environmental degradation. It is therefore crucial to act to further transform food systems towards more sustainable and healthy food systems that respect local food traditions and culture.
The new edition of this conference will focus on sustainable food systems for a healthy diet. The opening ceremony will take place on Monday 9 September at 9.00 a.m., with the participation of Mercè Segarra, Vice-Rector for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Transfer of the UB; Josep Usall, Director of the Institute for Research and Technology in Food and Agriculture (IRTA), and Montserrat Nuñez, President of the conference and member of IRTA.
The meeting will focus on Life Cycle Assessment and will bring together around 450 experts and professionals from academia, the private sector and public organizations from all over the world. It is promoted by an organizing committee headed by Montserrat Nuñez (IRTA) and Mariluz Latorre and Maria Carmen Vidal, from the UB’s Torribera Food Campus and the Institute for Research in Nutrition and Food Safety (INSA).
Food systems and life cycle: a global approach
The production, distribution and consumption of food have an undeniable environmental footprint. Current food consumption and forecasts of future needs on a global scale draw a vicious circle that requires producing more, with the consequent impact on the environment and planetary health, which is aggravated by the current context of climate change.
Sustainability assessment through life cycle analysis is an approach that identifies all processes along value chains that are determinant from an environmental perspective. This view helps to critically analyse the sustainability of current food systems in order to help them improve their ability to build a healthy planet.
One of the most important focal points of the scientific summit will be to integrate nutritional aspects into the life cycle analysis of food — a highly topical issue — as a decisive element in improving decision-making related to healthy and sustainable diets. This topic will be the focus of most sessions at the conference, with three blocks of parallel sessions on 9 September (Aula Magna), a discussion session and recommendations on 11 September (Chapel).
Among the participants will be the experts Joan David Tàbara, member of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), member of the Global Commons Alliance and associate researcher of the Global Climate Forum (created by Klaus Hasselmann, Nobel Prize in Physics 2021). He has focused his most recent research on the identification of positive tipping points in the face of climate change, the subject of the lecture he will give at the plenary session of the conference on 9 September.
Louise Fresco, president of Wageningen University (Netherlands) and its Executive Research Council from 2014 to 2022, is internationally renowned for her knowledge and insight into the history, present and future of agriculture. With a very extensive CV, she is vice-chair of the Scientific Group for the United Nations Food Systems Summit and sits on various scientific societies and advisory boards around the world, as well as being a lecturer, science popularizer and columnist.
Marta G. Rivera is a research professor at the Institute for Innovation and Knowledge Management (INGENIO, CSIC-UPV) and has a broad academic background in veterinary medicine, animal production, agricultural economics and sociology. As director of the Chair of Agroecology and Food Systems at the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia, she explored the interaction between agriculture, food, society and the environment. She has collaborated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and coordinated reports on sustainable food systems and the link between water, food, energy and ecosystems. She also contributed to the UN Women CSW66 report on gender equality and climate change. On Tuesday 10 September, Rivera and Fresco will speak at the plenary session on future agri-food systems for sustainability and health.
Joan Romanyà, lecturer at the Department of Biology, Health and Environment of the UB’s Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, is an expert in soil science and has outstanding experience in plant-soil relationships within natural and artificial ecosystems. Specializing in the management of soil organic matter for crop production, his research focuses on optimizing the use of local resources (organic residues, microbes and plants) to design sustainable agroecosystems; identifying agricultural practices that favour the reserve of soil organic matter and plant growth-promoting organisms; and studying relationships between soil organic matter, soil-plant microbes and nutrient availability. On Tuesday 10 September, in the Paranimph of the Historic Building, Romanyà will give a plenary lecture on healthy soils for a healthy life.
The programme includes dozens of working sessions in which experts from all over the world will present the most outstanding advances in their fields of research and their experiences in environmental impact assessment through LCA. Creating positive turning points to improve the conservation of the planet, regenerating the soils of the Mediterranean or what the agrifood systems of the future will be like are also interesting contents of the congress. The sessions will address questions such as whether lab-grown meat has a greater environmental impact than meat obtained from animal husbandry, and the environmental impact of food waste will also be debated at all stages of the food value chain.
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