As part of our doctoral programme in Food, Nutrition & Health, we are honoured to welcome Prof. Thomas Cherico Wanger Guerrero, Group Leader at Agroscope, Switzerland and Adjunct Full Professor with the Academy of Global Food Economics and Policy, Beijing, China.

Agricultural expansion and intensification are major drivers of greenhouse gas emissions, soil and freshwater degradation, biodiversity loss, and environmental pollution. The resulting environmental and human health costs exceed the value of the global agricultural production system by 2 billion USD, which urgently requires a global implementation of a food systems transformation to tackle the challenges of providing food security for a rapidly growing human population while minimizing environmental impacts and costs. Agricultural diversification, the addition of functional diversity to agricultural production systems, has been suggested to enhance socioeconomic and environmental aspects of food and commodity production as an essential building block of a global food system transformation.

In this talk, Prof. Wanger will present the work of his current and previous teams to advance the global food systems transformation. He will introduce their global synthesis works to quantify diversification opportunities for global staple food production based on meta analyses. We will look at machine learning and embedded systems to track pollinator responses to crop management in the lab and in the field. Then, we will find out more about the effects of plastic pollution and how to detect plastics in the environment. Lastly, we will focus on opportunities from technology innovation and diversification for crop variety development. Overall, this work is only useful if it can be implemented with stakeholders across the agricultural value chain, so he will conclude by sharing examples of how to bridge the gap between academic knowledge and practical implementation.

The presentation is open to all, so please feel free to join us and invite your colleagues !