Sustainably feeding global populations

Producing food in the ways we currently do contributes to 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which could add nearly 1 °C to global temperatures by the end of the century. This is creating a self-reinforcing cycle; higher temperatures are bringing more extreme weather and unpredictability to the seasons, increasing damage to harvests and farming.

On 15 November 2022, the human population reached 8 billion people. We’re expecting nearly 2 billion more people to join us within the next 30 years. To meet the demand of feeding all these people in both a healthy and a sustainable way, the United Nations projects that food production will need to increase 70% by 2050.

Instability and inequality in our food systems also puts a burden on people’s health. A recent study predicted a business-as-usual approach with our current food systems will leave 640 million people underweight by 2050, while obesity will increase by 70%.

The future of global food production and meeting the nutritional demands of 10 billion people requires addressing overlapping challenges of growing populations, changing demographics, climate change, and environmental degradation. But global food systems are already under immense pressure. Climate change, war and geopolitical conflicts, labor shortages, loss of biodiversity, water shortages, and rising global surface temperatures all make the situation more challenging. These challenges require a response to ensure we can feed current and future generations in a healthy and sustainable way.

To meet the nutritional needs of a changing global population, we need to find ways to increase food production in a sustainable way, using natural resources and land less intensively, whilst also curbing emissions and ensuring our crops are resilient in a warming climate and more extreme and variable weather. It’s a challenge that requires concerted efforts from scientists, policymakers, manufacturers, and farmers alike. Through this campaign, from our position in the scientific ecosystem bridging industry and academia through our online partnering platforms, we aim to surface and advance a new wave of technical solutions addressing these challenges.

Why did we choose this topic?

Sustainably feeding global populations is a challenge that touches many fields of research and industrial sectors. From the behavior of the global R&D community on our online partnering platform, Connect, we know that there is high demand for new innovation and technical solutions from industry. Our platform already hosts 600 available technologies relating to food innovation from universities and startups across the globe. And in our recently published ‘top innovations’ list, we rank the 13 most popular agritech innovations hosted on our platform from 2023.

The food production ecosystem and supply chain is complex. There are many different routes to get early-stage research out of academic and startup laboratories and into fields, greenhouses, and farms. Successfully deploying new technologies to make food production more sustainable increasingly involves the collaboration of many scientific experts and stakeholders, from fields including AI, biotechnology and bioengineering, cellular agriculture, genetic editing, enzyme design and cultivation, and robotics.

Inpart is an ideal partner sitting at the juncture of these fields across the research ecosystem. For this campaign, we are working with strategic partners who have expertise across biotechnology, alternative proteins, commercial manufacturing, as well as knowledge exchange, and research commercialization and venture creation.

What are the key challenges identified by our R&D community?

Innovation is key to helping transform the global food system, with promising technologies coming to market that address issues such as environmentally-friendly pest control, automated crop and water management, enriching nutritional value, and preventing soil degradation, amongst many others.

However, there are still many pressing challenges and unmet needs that companies are working to address, in collaboration with academia and startups, to bring innovative solutions from the lab to the fields. For this campaign, the key technical challenges are defined by our stakeholder research and by the R&D needs of our campaign partners: Merck, Incotec (part of Croda), The Good Food Institute Europe, Hochland, Charoen Pokphand Foods, Groupe Bel, and Carrot Ventures.

For example, there is mounting demand for the development and deployment of climate-resilient crop strains, as highlighted by the most recent ‘rice crisis’. Extreme weather across the globe has been impacting crop yields, while researchers estimate demand for staple crops like rice will increase by a third in the coming decades. Therefore, our R&D community is seeking research to aid the development of more resilient crops. For example, our industry partner, Incotec (part of Croda) is looking for on-seed solutions to mitigate abiotic stresses (primarily drought, cold, and salinity).

Another focus for the R&D ecosystem is developing alternative protein sources with a lower environmental impact than conventional livestock and dairy production, with equal or superior nutritional value. For example, our partner Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods is seeking external partners to develop novel plant-based meat analogue ingredients with improved tastes and textures that mimic meat products. Our partners Hochland and Bel are seeking external innovation to develop alternative plant-based cheeses.

In recent years there have also been big strides forward in sustainable meat production: cultivated meat products are gradually moving out of the lab and starting to form part of the wider movement for alternative proteins. One of our strategic partners for this campaign is The Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe, a nonprofit think tank nurturing an international network of organizations working to accelerate alternative protein innovation.

It's also important to consider the farm-to-fork journey beyond agricultural production. Last year the European Commission reported that global food miles generate nearly 20% of all CO2 emissions from food, indicating the need to implement more sustainable technologies up and down the global food supply chains. Our campaign partner, Carrot Ventures, is seeking novel technologies addressing the food processing and distribution value chain to support commercialization.

How are we aiming to address this challenge?

For this campaign, we build on the successes of our previous eight Global Challenge campaigns, replicating our model of mission-oriented innovation challenges to accelerate innovation in sustainable food production. We will be digging deeper, unrooting new scientific advances and technical innovation from across disciplines that can transform food systems in a sustainable way. We’re going to uncover new agritech assets and research to accelerate R&D efforts that will curb emissions, work towards eliminating global hunger, and establishing more sustainable farming, cultivation and manufacturing processes.