Workshops

The ICDA – International Confederation of Dietetic Associations’ #SustainableFoodSystems (SFS) Toolkit hosted a peer-to-peer learning session on developing Nutrition/Dietetic Association (NDA) position statements of other guidance. The learning session focused on discussion and questions. There were two sessions to cover different time zones. Before attending, participants listened to recordings and read the presentations that ICDA SFS Toolkit Advisors prepared to explain their experience with developing SFS positions/guides.

They shared a wide variety of lessons from different countries and situations ranging from advanced SFS positions that have been implemented for several years and are helping others, to those who are in the process of developing a paper or are just starting to think about it. Visit these links to Read:

1. The SFS Positions/Guides in the toolkit
2. The Summary report of the key points covered.

The Irish Forum for International Agricultural Development (IFIAD) held its 2023 Annual Conference on the theme of Sustainability and Agency in Transforming Food Systems. The UN Food Systems Summit +2 Stocktaking Moment 2023 re-affirmed the need for healthy, more sustainable, equitable and resilient food systems. Sustainability and agency are key components in transforming food systems. Securing sustainability in food systems will safeguard the environment and alleviate levels of hunger and malnutrition while prioritising agency can support equality in decision making agricultural practices and distribution.
The themes of sustainability and agency have grown in prominence in recent years and have been proposed as additional components in assessing food security, alongside, access, availability, utilisation and stability. It is against this backdrop that we are excited to bring together leading experts and organisations’ representing a broad spectrum of experience and perspectives.

16th European Public Health Conference: “Our Food, Our Health, Our Earth: A Sustainable Future for Humanity” 8-11 November 2023 in Dublin, Ireland, in person only. Over the next decade we will all make choices which will determine the future of our advanced technological society. The COVID-19 and monkeypox pandemics, through which the world is now living, are as graphic an example as could be desired of the instability of our model of life, and the need for action on One Health. We have now run out of road on climate emergency. 2021 was the warmest year on record, and 2022 and 2023 are likely to beat that record. The global climate is changing rapidly. Building a future, any kind of future, for us and for our children, demands a new attention to sustainability. It’s tempting to despair, to give up. Let’s not. This conference hopes to open up part of this discussion, with a focus on health, and health care. We can do better, and we have to do better. Greening the EPH Conference – EPH Conference is committed to reducing the environmental impact of the conference and finding ways to be more environmentally responsible. These are our initiatives we have taken together with The CCD, venue of the EPH Conference 2023, to minimize the impact of the conference on the environment.

On 4 and 5 of December 2023, the European Commission organised a conference in Brussels entitled “Food 2030: green and resilient food systems” to showcase achievements of EU food systems related projects, explore future research and innovation orientations and levers of change. The EC aims to convene a wide range of actors and policy makers for this in-person event, which was also web streamed and recorded for those unable to travel. Transforming our food systems for sustainability and resilience is pertinent and urgent to achieve EU Green Deal goals. The food system is highly complex, characterised by uncertainty, multiple drivers, impacts and interconnected sectors, requiring trade-offs. Acting simultaneously on many fronts is the only key to success. This is why we need a systems approach to understand the challenges and to target transformational change through a coherent set of policies, initiatives, and investments. The role of Research and Innovation (R&I) policy has finally been recognised as key to unravelling the complexities and catalysing solutions. In 2016, DG Research & Innovation launched the Food 2030 initiative, which set out an ambitious and impact-driven R&I policy framework for sustainable food systems, that is being deployed via Horizon Europe. Follow for more updates: @EUScienceInnov and #Food2030EU

Regeneration International Hosts the People’s Food Summit on World Food Day, October 16 each year. It is the only 24-hour global, participatory, virtual summit starting in Oceania and moving westwards through the time zones of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America. The People’s Food Summit enhances the connectedness of global work amongst numerous like-minded organizations.

The People’s Food Summit is a truly participatory summit that empowers most of the world’s food producers: the family farmers, pastoralists, and foresters who produce 70% of our food. We seek to engage hundreds of thousands by exchanging information and sharing inspiring stories. We present proven, farmer-based, real-world examples that are the future of our food and farming systems. These include agroecology, organic and regenerative farming, permaculture, agroforestry, holistically managed grazing, and many other systems.

The 2021 and 2022 events were spectacularly successful, with over 500,000 people, each time,  from all regions of our world, tuning in to watch and listen to our numerous speakers and their essential topics. In 2022, we promoted videos that we regarded as highlights of each region and reached another 700,000 views, bringing the total views to 1,200,000. Because we reached so many people, this event had a very high impact and will continue to. The past events remain available through the same link.

Our hope for the outcomes:
1. Information Exchange
2. Creating connections where different groups can continue working together after
3. Stimulating a citizen-led research and storytelling journey
4. Starting a partnership where Regeneration International continues to enable the scale-up of projects
5. Increasing the reach of this vital information to hundreds of thousands of people

Humankind is confronted with multiple deeply rooted and interlinked crises, including in relation to climate, biodiversity, conflict, energy, consumer prices, inequality, food insecurity, malnutrition and health. Global food systems challenges call for a profound and swift transformation of how we produce, process, retail, consume food and dispose organic waste.

The September 2021 UN Secretary-General’s Food Systems Summit (UN FSS) created important momentum to trigger transformation. Contributing to the 2023 Stock-Taking Moment of the UN FSS follow-up process, this conference will look at how food systems need to be transformed to overcome these crises in order to minimize the risk of global collapse and achieve the SDGs.

The 21st Annual STS Conference Graz 2023 „Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies“ is organised by Science Technology and Society Unit of the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science of Graz University of Technology. There is a track with sessions in Sustainable Food Systems including – F.1 Microbes in, for, around Food Systems – F.2 From the edge to the core: participatory food environment research in European cities – F.3 Food Justice in Alternative Food Networks: theoretical, empirical and transdisciplinary perspectives – F.4 (M)eating the future: technologies, materialities, and politics of food – F.5 How can universities support the transition to sustainable food systems?