ProfessorDavid Raubenheimer

Project Opportunities

Title: CONNECTING NUTRITIONAL GEOMETRY WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Summary of opportunity:

The project will deal with connecting nutritional geometry principles developed by Profs Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer at the Charles Perkins Centre of the University of Sydney with sustainable development goals. The idea is to source, process and analyse food- and sustainability-related data, with the aim to portray and graph food items, meals and diets in the traditional nutritional geometry triangle, against proxy indicators for sustainable development goals. This novel way of connecting nutrition and sustainability will allow identifying win-wins and trade-offs when developing food- and nutrition-related sustainability policies.

The PhD will be supervised by Prof. Manfred Lenzen. The applicant will join the ISA Research Group at the School of Physics – The University of Sydney. ISA develops leading-edge research and applications for environmental and broader sustainability issues, bringing together expertise in environmental science, economics, technology, and social science. Prof. David Raubenheimer is also a supervisor for this project.

Opportunity synopsis:

Input-output analysis (IOA) allows the characterisation of food items in terms of any physical indicator, across the entire upstream supply-chain network, or life cycle, of food production systems. IOA thus enables the investigation of more sustainable diets. Using IOA, nutritional geometry principles can be established for a range of economic, social and environmental indicators, and these indicators can be linked to a sustainable development goal or planetary boundary.

More specifically, the strategy for portraying environmental and broader sustainability objectives of food items, meals and diets in nutritional geometry triangles would be to
a) characterise food items, meals and diets in terms of their carbohydrate, fat and protein content,
b) use IOA to establish economic, environmental and social impacts for each item, meal and diet, and
c) interpolate the cloud of observations into a colour map.

The overlay of nutritional geometry triangles for different sustainability indicators can assist in identifying trade-offs and win-win opportunities for policy design. Comparisons are aided by the fact that – due to their UN standardisation – IO-based quantities are accounted for with identical scope. This analysis can be carried out for any year between 1990 and 2015, and the results can support monitoring progress towards sustainable development goals. Time series data will inform about trends and will assist in identifying global drivers for changes in food and nutrition provision.

Project Opportunities

Title: VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN FOOD AND NUTRITION PROVISION

Summary of opportunity:

Primary producers of agricultural commodities and consumers of food items desiring a balanced nutrition and health are linked by a global supply-chain system, in which demand and supply decisions cause environmental, social and economic impacts. With intensifying globalisation and integration of international production systems, food consumers in a particular location are increasingly tele-connected to distant primary producers elsewhere.

An important type of indirect supply-chain impacts are global disaster events: Facing an ever-growing risk from climate change etc., primary producers are vulnerable to floods, droughts, storms, disease etc., and – facilitated by dependence on international supply relationships – this vulnerability translates directly into diminished food and nutrition security for consumers elsewhere, and into insurance risk.

Recognising the international interconnectedness of food production and consumption systems, this project therefore employs a global life-cycle approach to local food and nutrition security and planetary health, with a focus on Australia’s place in the world.

The PhD will be supervised by Prof. Manfred Lenzen. The applicant will join the ISA Research Group at the School of Physics – The University of Sydney. ISA develops leading-edge research and applications for environmental and broader sustainability issues, bringing together expertise in environmental science, economics, technology, and social science.

Opportunity synopsis:

Given that food and nutrition security, and planetary health, are global problems, and that Australia is inextricably linked into the world economy, this project uses a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) research framework that
a) allows modelling of international trade and the global supply-chain network,
b) provides completely harmonised physical and economic data at the global scale and at the detail of individual economic sectors, and
c) is governed by accepted worldwide standards.

Input-output analysis (IOA) is an economic technique conceived in the 1930s by Nobel Prize Laureate Wassily Leontief. IOA is able to interrogate economic data on inter-industry trade, final consumption and value added, connect individual transactions to global supply-chains, then trace physical and economic activity rippling throughout the resulting complex supply-chain network, and unveil both immediate and indirect impacts of systemic shocks. Over the past seventy years, IOA has been used extensively for a wide range of public policy and scientific research questions.

National food systems are vulnerable to adverse events within but also beyond their borders. Six countries in the world supply almost half, or more than half of global exports of four of the world’s most important staple crops: rice, wheat, soy beans and corn. Many of these crop systems are vulnerable to natural disasters such as floods, droughts and storms, or human-induced disasters such as chemical pollution, invasive species, or civil unrest. Any adverse event that destroyed a sizable fraction of national crops would lead to production shortfalls. In order to understand these vulnerabilities, it is helpful to understand the “global hinterland” of a country’s food consumption. In other words: Where does the food that a country consumes come from? And in addition, where do non-food items that are needed for food production (for example agricultural machinery, pesticides, fertiliser) and their supply-chain inputs (steel, chemicals, and so on) come from? This project will answer these questions by conducting a complete global life-cycle assessment of food consumption.