This postdoctoral research position is part of the FLORA project ("Sustainable and healthy food solutions: system dynamics and trade-offs"), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Carole DALIN (webpage), in the Geosciences Department of the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), in the centre of Paris.

The selected candidate will join the FLORA research team, collaborating with researchers in the team, department and beyond, to answer the project’s first main research question: “How far are current global food systems from environmental sustainability and health goals?”.

About the FLORA project:

Food systems are crucial to end hunger, but also to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to protect and restore biodiversity, to ensure human health and well-being, to end poverty, and to support sustainable communities. While hunger has receded, food systems are causing increasingly severe damage to our environment and health. The FLORA project will contribute to a transformation of global agri-food production, trade, and consumption necessary to achieve sustainable and healthy food systems.

The project will create essential evidence to identify and implement the shifts in practices and behaviours needed to effectively achieve this transformation, by (1) making a diagnosis of the integrated health and environmental outcomes of food systems globally, from the production and consumption perspectives, with innovative measures of sustainability, (2) identifying key threats and opportunities with system dynamics and complex network analyses, and (3) targeting and evaluating tailored solutions with an inter-disciplinary modelling framework.

The project will enable the identification of most effective, targeted solutions by considering trade-offs, synergies, and dynamics of key food systems components. Global in scope, it sets the ambitious goal to overcome barriers in current approaches by taking a systemic approach and establishing a robust, interdisciplinary framework supported by empirical advancements to tackle complex food systems challenges.

MISSIONS AND ACTIVITIES

Main missions :

The key research objectives for the selected candidate are listed below, with some flexibility to explore further specific aspect(s) depending on the candidate’s skills and interests:

1. developing and quantifying an integrated indicator of environmental sustainability and nutrition security of food worldwide, from the consumption and production perspectives, for a reference time period
2. carrying out the extension of this indicator over time using emerging datasets

The first objective builds upon work from the team, covering impacts of crop and livestock production worldwide on climate change via greenhouse gas emissions; water stress via withdrawals from soil, surface water and groundwater for irrigation; and both aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity via the use of farming inputs (fertilisers) and land, respectively. This is done at a high spatial resolution of approximatively 9km x 9 km across the globe (5arc min).

Here there is potential to expand this to cover fisheries including fish feed and their environmental impacts.

In addition, the selected candidate will use international food trade data to understand these impacts with a consumption based-perspective.

Finally, the selected candidate will use nutritional data and develop metrics to build the human health dimension of the indicator; considering the balance and adequacy of available nutrients for human consumption in countries’ food supply, food affordability and good accessibility.

The second objective will be to use emerging global spatial datasets available over time to extend the quantification of the indicator over 2 to 3 historical decades.

Main activities :

• Research : data collection and analysis, modelling, publishing results in high-quality peer-reviewed articles
• Presenting results at scientific conferences
• Attending the lab activities such as seminars and relevant workshops

WORK ENVIRONMENT

The selected candidate will be part of an international collaboration network for the FLORA project. At ENS, they will mainly interact with colleagues from the two laboratories at the Department of Geosciences: Geology Lab (LG ENS, link) and Dynamic Meteorology Lab (LMD, link), as well as with the interdisciplinary Centre on Environment and Society (CERES, link).

Both labs are parts of the interdisciplinary research federation Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL, link); a unique place for scientific exchange at the intersection of many areas of expertise in environment. Notably, this enables the team to use supercomputers and databases of the IPSL global climate model simulations.