This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101000640

OVERVIEW

“Co-creating resilient and sustainable food systems towards FOOD2030” ('cities2030') is a project triggered and entirely designed by IAAD, also key proposal production manager on behalf of Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Veneto, Italy).

Cities and regions food systems (CRFS) demand immediate action. 'cities2030' proposes consumers must be at the core of solutions.

More than 7.7 billion consumers hold the power to shift 100-year old consumption patterns to meet the requirements for an improved future. The challenges: population overgrowth, rapid urbanisation, vast migration phenomena, climate change and resources scarcity.

9 billion people, most living in cities, 3 billion overweight, and 2 billion without enough food.

Without action toward transition towards sustainable CRFS, the environment will persist being degraded and diminish the world’s capacities to produce quality food for all, whilst decreasing capacities to provide food to all.

CRFS poses a planetary challenge that 'cities2030', a new initiative, addresses at local and regional levels, to generate small steps, systemic, pragmatic, actionable, transferable and sustainable solutions.

The project innovative approach have a great opportunity to attract the best researchers, entrepreneurs, civil society leaders, cities and all agents of the CRFS as well.

The main goal of 'cities2030' is to future proof an effective CRFS via a connected structure centered in the citizen, built on trust, with partners encompassing the entire CRFS.

Over 4 years, 41 pan-European partners commit to work towards the transformation and restructuring of the way systems produce, transport and supply, recycle and reuse food in the 21^st century.

'cities2030'vision is to connect short food supply chains, gathering consumers, strategic and complement industry partners, the civil society, promising start-ups and enterprises, innovators and visionary thinkers, leading universities and research across the vast diversity of disciplines addressing CRFS, including food science, social science and big data.

In the course of its development, the project aim at raising funds and is expected to attract significant funding from diverse sources of private and public sector investments.

'cities2030' actively encourage the participation of citizens by delivering a trusted CRFS, moving consumers from being passive recipients to active engagement and motivated change agents.

This objective is achieved via multiple tools delivered by 'cities2030' such as the 'CRFS Alliance', a community of practice supported by a digital platform, reaching all over Europe and beyond.

This approach will enable innovation actions and enhancements on a pan-European scope with a global reach. Cities and regions will improve resilience and sustainability, and their leadership will create short food supply chain and ecosystems enabling local investments, trans-borders and transnational deployment.

A blockchain-based data-driven CRFS management platform will secure intelligence and coordination actions by delivering an accurate, almost real-time digital twin of the whole supply chain, e.g. from production to waste management, but also on four key enablers of resilience and sustainability: security, ecosystem services, livelihood (e.g. growth) and equity (e.g. inclusivity).

CE-FNR-07-2020 globally tackles 12 widely challenging scopes of actions which does not leave without recalling the 12 labours of a certain hero.

'cities2030' addresses each of these scopes to generate and deploy an actionable roadmap to structure, accelerate and sustain transforming CRFS, and to deliver frameworks for the production of policies (e.g. action plans) and innovations (e.g. supporting instruments), towards the democratization and implementation of sustainable urban food system practice, which will be piloted in real-scale in 9 selected cities and 2 regions.

The project partners acknowledge and define sustainable CRFS as schemes which effectively delivers practical answers to combined FOOD 2030 (all four pillars) and UN’s SDG11 and New Urban Agenda (all policies referred later as EU-UN).

Also, partners ideate enhanced food systems per the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security.

'cities2030' activates, accelerates, structures and generates 9 front-runners EU cities pilots and 2 regions, whilst establishing corresponding numbers of policy and living labs, and further deploys to a total of 50 EU cities pilots by 16.10.2024 on the World Food Day that year.

The aforementioned roadmap is co-created and implemented by 500 actors of the food chain and systems arena from 19 countries, abiding an open and participatory process, and framed in policy and living labs.

'cities2030' acknowledges the definition of the anticipated policy and living labs as “A Living Lab is an orchestrator of open innovation processes focusing on co-creation of innovations in real-world contexts by involving multiple stakeholders with the objective to generate sustainable value for all stakeholders focusing in particular on the end-users”.

The initiative is a cross-sector and multistakeholder effort to assist cities and regions implement sustainable cities and regions food systems (CRFS) and achieve five specific objectives, illustrated in the figure below.

'cities2030' build upon and leverage MUFPP and EUROCITIES WG Food key findings, and its bedrock is rooted in the policy conceptual approach recently published “Towards a Common Food Policy for the EU” by IPES-Food.

The report argues for a “Common Food Policy“ for the European Union: “a policy setting a direction of travel for the whole food system, bringing together the various sectoral policies that affect food production, processing, distribution, and consumption, and refocusing all actions on the transition to sustainability.”

'cities2030' uptakes substantial insight from organisations substantially active in the food system and ecosystems arena, e.g. 100 Resilient Cities, C40 Cities, Climate KIC, EIT Food, EUI, ICLEI, IFOAM, IPES Food, FAO, the Future Food Institute, EPI-Agri, the Nordic Food Policy Lab, RUAF, Slow Food Europe, Sustainable Food Cities. This specific group is the source of key insight, building and evolving continuously, and later referred to as the “MUFPP+”.

To achieve the aforementioned 5 specific objectives 'cities2030' starts by gathering intelligence to secure the establishment of accurate laboratories within which participatory activities will develop to deliver evidence-based answers to identified needs in these 5 specific areas with policies frameworks and innovation pathways.

Then, 'cities2030' is organised to generate an actionable and structured knowledge basis to establish and enhance CRFS; establish or enhance existing CRFS policy labs (CRFS-PL) which will pave the way towards sustainable policy frameworks for food systems transition; establish or enhance existing CRFS living labs (CRFS-LL) which will generate innovative systems to support food systems transition; deliver a cradle-to-cradle data-driven CRFS management digital platform based on blockchain technology: Single Click CRFS Platform (S2CP).

Rather than systematically creating new developments (that requires a substantial number of resources, 'cities2030' implement small systemic changes at local level and per the specific context of the city and country, effectively implementing changes towards a larger transformation process towards EU-UN framework of reference.

To secure the roadmap implementation 'cities2030' develops on focus groups of 4 key actors of the CRFS with the city and region acting as driver, incorporating one research body, a business and a civil society organisation.

Focus group are commissioned to generate the larger group of organisations representing a comprehensive CRFS to engage in the project activities.

Key activities are developed according to 10 central thematic that cover the 5 aforementioned specific objectives.

Coordinator: Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Veneto, Italy

Partners:

EPC - European Project Consulting Srl (Italy), Gemeentebestuur Brugge (Belgium), VIVES University College (Belgium), İstanbul Avrupa Araştırmaları Derneği – IAAD (Turkey), INAGRO (Belgium), Provinciaalevap Erevnitiko Idrima P.L. – UNRF (Cyprus), Razvojna agencije Grada Velika Gorica VE-GO-RA (Croatia), Inventivna rjesenja (Croatia), Vejle Kommune (Denmark), Quantitas Srl (Italy), Into Seinäjoki Oy (Finland), Proagria Etela-Pohjanmaa ry (Finland), Smart & Lean Hub oy (Finland), Magistrat der Stadt Bremerhaven (Germany), Verein Zur For. Des Tech. An Der Hoch. Bremerhaven Ev (Germany), Biozoon Gmbh (Germany), Ayuntamiento de Quart de Poblet (Spain), Socialinnolabs (Spain), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland), MATIS OHF (Iceland), Future Food Institute (Italy), Vidzeme Planning Region (Latvia), Latvian Lauku Forums – LLF (Latvia), Association Green Growth Platform Skopje (North Macedonia), AG Futura Technologies Dooel Skopje (North Macedonia), City Hall of Iaşi (Romania), Academia Romana – Filiala Iaşi (Romania), ITC – Innov. Technology Cluster Murska Sobota (Romania), Correlate As (Norway), Comune di Vicenza (Italy), Stichting VU (Netherlands), Mestna občina Murska Sobota (Slovenia), Université du Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Union of Cyprus Communities (Cyprus), Primelayer, Unipessoal, Lda (Portugal), Università IUAV di Venezia (Italy), Rigas Tehniska Universitate (Latvia), Cité de l’Agriculture (France), Gemeente Haarlem (Netherlands)

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Website soon to be released

Soon to be released

'cities2030 > Impetus for FOOD2030' | LinkedIn | Published on May 29, 2020