FOODLEVERS

Despite the recent uptake of innovative production systems, food systems continue to move on unsustainable trajectories. This can be explained by many sustainability interventions addressing solely more obvious but less powerful areas of intervention rather than engaging with the root causes of unsustainability. Instead, FOODLEVERS focuses on identifying those leverage points at which interventions promise far more potential to further develop and scale-up existing innovative organic and sustainable food systems (FSs). It aims to promote higher resource-efficiency, highlight inefficiencies, specify the reasons for decision-making processes that led to the current configuration of FSs, and thus identify configurations that “work” and may be scaled up. Despite the recent uptake of innovative production systems, food systems continue to move on unsusustainable trajectories. This can be explained by many sustainability interventions addressing solely more obvious but less powerful areas of intervention rather than engaging with the root causes of unsustainability. Instead, FOODLEVERS focuses on those leverage points at which interventions promise far more potential to transform food systems into sustainable ones. Therefore, the project will analyse case studies of innovative organic and sustainable food systems troughout Europe and identify best practice processes. By doing so, key leverage points will be identified to further develop and scale up existing innovative organic and sustainable food systems. What: identify “deep” leverage points in organic and sustainable food systems Why: contrary to the common practice of sustainability interventions FOODLEVERS addresses the key problems underlying unsustainability instead of focusing on weak leverage points Where: Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom