How can action on deforestation strengthen UK food resilience?
Introducing a new research project exploring the link between deforestation and UK food resilience. The UK government’s recent national security assessment highlights the risks of accelerating global ecosystem degradation for UK food security. In collaboration with DEFRA, the project brings together an interdisciplinary team to identify evidence-based policy solutions, funded by the Agile Initiative.
The UK government’s recent national security assessment underscores that accelerating global ecosystem degradation and collapse pose a serious threat to the UK food system, economic stability and international security. As climate change, biodiversity loss, and forest-risk commodity supply chains are increasingly intertwined, action on forest protection can no longer be treated as an environmental add-on, but as a core resilience strategy. Aligning deforestation-free trade and credible, science-based and equitable forest partnerships is essential not only to safeguard carbon-rich, biodiversity-critical forest ecosystems abroad, but also to strengthen global resilience while enhancing the capacity of countries like the UK to absorb shocks across their own food system. Despite increasing policy attention on forests as globally important ecosystems and progress in supply chain transparency, current analytical tools still do not adequately connect forest action in producer countries with measurable outcomes for UK food-system security and resilience.
The new research project, “How can action on deforestation strengthen the UK’s food system security and resilience,” explores the links between deforestation, supply chains and food system resilience by bringing together researchers and stakeholders to identify practical, evidence-based policy solutions, funded by the Agile Initiative. In collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), this Research Sprint will explore how alternative deforestation-control pathways may affect agricultural output, trade patterns, livelihoods, and the UK’s food systems.
“Through this Sprint, we aim to synthesise emerging scientific evidence to assess how action on deforestation in producer countries influences potential cascading risks to the UK’s food‑system resilience.” – Aline Soterroni
Understanding how risks propagate through global value chains, and the conditions that determine the effectiveness of deforestation-control policies for mitigating those risks is particularly crucial now, at a time when deforestation and forest restoration have been recognised as critical to achieving multiple climate, nature, and social objectives.
“No discipline can provide an answer to our research questions on its own. So, we are experimenting with an interdisciplinary approach, combining different tools, methodologies and perspectives to start scratching the surface and uncovering the connections that matter, building the interdisciplinary evidence that policymakers need.” – Michael Ruggeri
We have an interdisciplinary team of researchers working on the project, whose expertise and contributions will support the project’s ongoing research, stakeholder engagement, and impact activities.