To secure a continued supply of safe, tasty, affordable and functional/healthy proteins while supporting Net Zero goals and future-proofing UK food security, a phased-transition towards low-emission alternative proteins (APs) with a reduced reliance on animal agriculture is imperative. However, population-level access to and acceptance of APs is hindered by a highly complex marketplace challenged by taste, cost, health and safety concerns for consumers, and the fear of diminished livelihoods by farmers. Furthermore, complex regulatory pathways and limited access to affordable and accessible scale-up infrastructure impose challenges for industry and SMEs in particular. Synergistic bridging of the UK's trailblazing science and innovation strengths in AP with manufacturing power is key to realising the UK's ambitious growth potential in AP of £6.8B annually and could create 25,000 jobs across multiple sectors. The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC), a cohesive pan-UK centre, will revolutionise the UK's agri-food sector by harnessing our world-leading science base through a co-created AP strategy across the Discovery?Innovation?Commercialisation pipeline to support the transition to a sustainable, high growth, blended protein bioeconomy using a consumer-driven approach, thereby changing the economics for farmers and other stakeholders throughout the supply chain. Built on four interdisciplinary knowledge pillars, PRODUCE, PROCESS, PERFORM and PEOPLE covering the entire value chain of AP, we will enable an efficacious and safe translation of new transformative technologies unlocking the benefits of APs. Partnering with global industry, regulators, investors, academic partners and policymakers, and engaging in an open dialogue with UK citizens, NAPIC will produce a clear roadmap for the development of a National Protein Strategy for the UK. NAPIC will enable us to PRODUCE tasty, nutritious, safe, and affordable AP foods and feedstocks necessary to safeguard present and future generations, while reducing concerns about ultra-processed foods and assisting a just-transition for producers. Our PROCESS Pillar will catalyse bioprocessing at scale, mainstreaming cultivated meat and precision fermentation, and diversify AP sources across the terrestrial and aquatic kingdoms of life, delivering economies of scale. Delivering a just-transition to an AP-rich future, we will ensure AP PERFORM, both pre-consumption, and post-consumption, safeguarding public health. Finally, NAPIC is all about PEOPLE, guiding a consumers' dietary transition, and identifying new business opportunities for farmers, future-proofing the UK's protein supply against reliance on imports. Working with UK industry, the third sector and academia, NAPIC will create a National Knowledge base for AP addressing the unmet scientific, commercial, technical and regulatory needs of the sector, develop new tools and standards for product quality and safety and simplify knowledge transfer by catalysing collaboration. NAPIC will ease access to existing innovation facilities and hubs, accelerating industrial adoption underpinned by informed regulatory pathways. We will develop the future leaders of this rapidly evolving sector with bespoke technical, entrepreneurial, regulatory and policy training, and promote knowledge exchange through our unrivalled international network of partners across multiple continents including Protein Industries Canada and the UK-Irish Co-Centre, SUREFOOD. NAPIC will provide a robust and sustainable platform of open innovation and responsible data exchange that mitigates risks associated with this emerging sector and addresses concerns of consumers and producers. Our vision is to make "alternative proteins mainstream for a sustainable planet" and our ambition is to deliver a world-leading innovation and knowledge centre to put the UK at the forefront of the fights for population health equity and against climate change.

Peru is one the world's worst COVID affected countries. Gaps in social welfare, poor infrastucture and living conditions and high levels of informal employment exacerbate the impact of this disease. Artisanal fisheries are an important and overlooked activity which provides employment and basic nutrition for some of the poorest in rural areas. Thousands of jobs in the seadood supply chain are affected by the pandemic. In the Piura region, the impact on fishing communities is expected to be higher due to the large number of people involved in fisheries-dependent activities and the lack of alternative economic opportunities. There has been no systematic effort to document the impact of COVID on these communities. The Regional Government has identified a need for this information in order to respond with appropiate social welfare measures and is leading an Inter-Agency Consortium (IAC) to re-establish artisanal fisheries activities. This project will support the IAC by collecting and disseminating data on the impact of COVID in fishing communities. It will assess key fisheries, rigorously estimate the impact of the pandemic througout the supply chain and look at the way that this has, or needs to adapt to become more resilient. Throught the timely provision of relevant socio-economic information through a virtual online platform, this project will support decision-making by fishers, government and society in general, By engaging stakeholders in affected communities the project will develop recommendations for a sustained re-activation of fishing and associated activities.

By 2050 it is estimated that the global population will exceed 9 billion. This is expected to result in a 100% increase in demand for food. The world needs more high-quality protein, produced in a responsible manner. This challenge is addressed by UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG2 (Zero hunger) and SDG12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). Expansion of marine fish aquaculture has been highlighted as a key route to increase food production. It is also an important area for the blue economy with high potential for new jobs and revenue. In the UK, marine aquaculture is worth over £2 billion to the economy, supports 2300 jobs and has ambitions to double production by 2030. But climate change is a threat as fish production is highly sensitive to the environment. Climate change assessments are often only available for large areas, e.g. global or regional, and do not capture the local conditions that influence fish production. They focus on long-term decadal averages which miss the daily environmental variability and multiple stressors that fish experience. Impacts on growth, health and welfare of the farmed fish are determined by these environment-biological complexities at farm level, and are also influenced by production strategies and industry decisions which may be based on social or economic factors. Robust, industry-relevant, climate impact assessment must include the complexities, relationships and trade-offs between different natural processes and human interventions. Thus, a more comprehensive approach which uses systems thinking to capture the interlinking interdisciplinary components is urgently needed. Precision aquaculture, where vast amounts of data are collected and analysed, offers a framework to provide the detail required to understand the complex farm system, evaluate how the environment is changing and assess implications for future production. In this FLF, I will deliver a rigorous scientific framework for assessing impact of climate change on marine aquaculture using systems thinking and precision-based information. I will create an approach which integrates detailed knowledge of what is happening in the complex farm system now, with future projections of climate change and potential stakeholder response. This will involve collecting high resolution data, analysing complex datasets, developing farm-level models, simulating future climate scenarios, and determining the adaptive capacity of the sector. I will work closely with my network of key industry partners, research organisations, regulators and policy makers to maximise translation and transfer of knowledge and approaches to industry and associated stakeholders. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) aquaculture in the Northeast Atlantic (Scotland and Norway) is used as a case study. Salmon leads marine fish production, with over 2 million tonnes produced each year, the equivalent of 17.5 billion meals. Norway and Scotland are responsible for 60% of production. The latitudinal range of farms extends across the thermal tolerance of the salmon, from temperate conditions in Scotland and south Norway, to arctic conditions in the north of Norway. This allows assessment of the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of climate change and a thorough analysis of how impact may vary between locations and different responses required. Beyond aquaculture, the positioning of marine fish farms offers an exceptional opportunity to gain deeper insight into the rate, magnitude and variability of climate change in coastal areas. This FLF will deliver vital new knowledge, data and approaches to understand how the environment is changing. This research is highly interdisciplinary, covering aspects of climate, environmental, biological and social science. The innovative techniques and transformative approaches will allow aquaculture to respond to the climate emergency, enhance blue economy opportunities and maximise its contribution to global food security.

Feminist scholars have demonstrated the invisibility of women's reproductive labour (or social reproduction - SR), performed in bearing and raising children, maintaining households and socially sustaining and guaranteeing the daily reproduction of the labour-force. SR theories highlight that capitalist forms of production necessarily rely on devaluing reproductive activities through inequalities drawn along lines of gender, race, class and citizenship status. Without this un(der)paid labour there would be no production or accumulation. This argument extends beyond domestic labour, pointing to the large reservoir of unwaged labour and 'cheap natures' (i.e. low-cost food, energy and raw-material) that sustains the life process, whilst also generating value for capital. This conformation of labour and distinctions between what is productive and reproductive work, permeate in our current Food Systems which are increasingly commodified, are concentrated in the hands of a few powerful corporations, financialised and extractive. Academically and in policy-making, we still tend to study different aspects of food separately and often policies to improve food systems focus on a particular part of the problem, such as increasing yields or improving diets. Whilst this approach has led to major insights and development of expertise in specific fields, solutions rarely have an impact beyond their own discipline and carry the risk of worsening problems considered 'out of scope'. The main innovation presented by this research, is that by using a Social Reproduction lens, the body of knowledge and practice developed by the fellowship will incorporate what is beyond prevailing Food Systems literature and policy. Therefore, it contributes to design and implementation of transformative actions that tackle the underpinning causes of the triple burden of malnutrition - the coexistence of undernutrition, obesity and micro-nutrient deficiencies - and the socio-economic and environmental inequalities perpetuated by current food systems. Anchored in the notion of a continuum between socio-political-economic trends between Global South and Global North and located in the political economy contexts of SA, GH and the UK, the research carried out by the Observatory aims at unpacking the food systems-social reproduction nexus. Using a participatory, interdisciplinary and technology-based approach, the Observatory broadly conceptualises female, racialised and working-class reproductive labour to include un(der)paid reproductive work, but also abject forms of food labour performed outside of the institutional domain of the market, namely, subsistence farming or maintenance of homestead gardens, environmental stewardships, work in food solidarity networks. A SR lens is based on the idea that to understand how we sustain our lives from one generation to the next, we need to unpack how different parts of the economy and society relate to each other. Therefore, SR is well suited to help us develop a more holistic understanding of the ways we produce and consume food. In particular, this can highlight how unpaid work and the work performed in the informal sector, are fundamental to shaping the ways food is produced, distributed, sold and consumed. The Fellowship will study the production, supply and consumption of selected food sectors in SA and GH (high-end horticultural products destined the UK markets), the UK (food manufactured goods - confectionery, drinks and beverages- exported to SA and GH). Anchored in co-creation, the research will provide the case-studies that help to answer the following research questions: 1) What are the social reproductive costs of the current ways in which food is produced and consumed? 2) How do households, communities and states manage and care for food work and food consumption related health burdens? 3) What is the role of the private sector and the state in promoting or hindering better labour and food consumption

This multi-country project aims to establish the health benefits of large-scale land restoration in Africa's Sahel region. We will leverage the Great Green Wall (GGW) of Africa initiative, the largest land restoration effort in the world, as a natural experimental system. Drylands host nearly 40% of the global population. The GGW and other similar land-restoration efforts currently underway around the world are set to reshape landscapes and the lived experiences of billions of people globally. Such restoration efforts are increasingly being regarded as potential 'Nature-based solutions' as the world seeks to confront and adapt to the triple challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and food security. At present however, human health considerations play a very minor role in the design and implementation of restoration projects, including the GGW. This project aims to fill this critical gap, to ensure restoration projects can maximally serve human health alongside other objectives. We will use a novel combination of activities spanning 4 integrated work packages to do this. Briefly, WP1 will comprise a literature review and community consultations to develop an iteratively refined, gender-sensitive logic model describing the causal linkages between dryland restoration and human health. This will guide the project by helping to refine key hypotheses and identify a suitable subset of secondary health outcomes to be evaluated in subsequent WPs. In WP2 we will collate as much existing data as possible for GGW countries to conduct a Sahel-wide village-matched health impact evaluation. The primary outcome to be investigated will be weight-for-age z score (WAZ) of children (0-59 months) as a measure of acute nutritional status. A subset of secondary outcomes in children and women emerging from WP1 as of particular relevance will also be considered. We will compare health outcomes between communities with and without GGW activities to evaluate the health impacts of restoration. WP3 will be a follow-up of WPs1-2 in which we will conduct a more targeted, community-prioritised, village-matched health impact evaluation with primary data collection in three focal countries (The Gambia, Senegal, Burkina Faso). Based on our current understanding of the linkages between health and environmental restoration, these are likely to include other anthropometric measures (e.g., height-for-age z score, HAZ), and outcomes reflecting risk factors on the nutrition, infection and mental health / well-being pathways. We will again focus on children and non-pregnant women. Some secondary outcomes require collection of biological samples from children for laboratory analysis. Follow-up sampling will give information on seasonal effects and an opportunity to compare child growth over a 12-14 month period between groups with and without GGW interventions. WP4 comprises a set of integrating tasks aimed at marrying the results of the health impact evaluations with current activities guiding the design and implementation of the GGW and understanding the role of and benefits to health of completing the GGW. With an anticipated cost of around $50 billion to reach its 100 million hectare target of restored drylands by 2030, it is essential for health impacts (benefits and costs) to be brought into existing decision-support tools for applied purposes. We will do this via a combination of steps from health economic evaluation, cost-benefit and trade-off analysis, and systems and scenario modelling in the context of a changing climate. In all WPs, our Project Partners and Scientific Steering Committee will further ensure local relevance and streamline the research-to-practice pipeline, enhancing impact.