Scott Bremer
Title: Healthy Food and Sustainable Agriculture: Towards Transformative Practices
Abstract: Food insecurity is a recognized global problem at least since the middle of the twentieth century, expressed in the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, FAO monitors and measures hunger and undernourishment and develops proposals for enhancing food security. More recently, the focus has been widened to include the ways in which food is produced, traded, consumed, and also lost and wasted, often in ways that are highly unsustainable for the inhabitability of the planet. Recent authoritative reports from European science advisors underline the connection between food security and sustainability, and the urgency with which concerted transformative action is required. Of particular note for these experts is the globally increasing share of animal-based ingredients in human food. Against this background, Academia Europaea has set up a Taskforce on Environment, Sustainability and Climate, to nurture interdisciplinary discussion but also show a way for academies to move beyond scholarly exchange and evidence-reports, towards exploring and proposing transformative practices. One proposal could be towards the global organisation of the collection of region-sensitive evidence on food and sustainability and the elaboration of proposals towards a sustainable way of globally reaching food security. This could include elaborating on the single indicator for food security and sustainability, namely the human trophical level (HTL). This indicator is already used in monitoring the accomplishment of UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 „Zero Hunger”.
Bio: Dr. Scott Bremer is a senior researcher at the Centre for Study of the Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Bergen, and a research associate at NORCE Climate. With a background in planning, policy and public administration, Bremer’s works broadly as an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, with a current focus on climate adaptation governance. More particularly, he is interested in how science and other ways of knowing (such as local, traditional or cultural knowledges) are drawn on for decision-making in institutional settings, across the so-called science-policy interface. This has seen Bremer conceptualise and empirically test out extended modes of science – building on traditions of post-normal science and transdisciplinarity – as collaborative enquiries with all concerned by an issue, with normative ambitions to co-produce knowledge and action. He currently leads a research group, under the ERC-funded CALENDERS project, undertaking research internationally into how taken-for-granted temporal frameworks influence the ways groups time and coordinate activities under environmental and social change. Through his research Bremer is active on both sides of the science-policy interface. At NORCE Climate, he works with climate scientists in thinking about how to link their science to governance processes, including at the new 'Climate Futures’ centre. On the policy side, Bremer is co-vice-chair of the Young Academy of Europe, active in the network of organisations promoting science policy and science for policy.
