FoodSIVI welcomes the opportunity to collaborate on research and pilots
through secondments and grant funded or commissioned research projects.
Contact us if you’d like to work together.

FoodSIVI is a forum for academia, business and civil society to co-develop research funding bids. Bids for publicly funded competitive research grants can be academic-led or industry-led.

Examples of projects include:

Research technologies that incentivise the generation of useful data

Research technologies that, with capital investment, could incentivise farmers, processors and supply chains to transact environmental and social impact data in the form that companies need for integrated and SDG reporting.

Incentivising impact data along food value chains

Investigate mechanisms by which major food companies and food retailers can obtain financial capital (e.g. ETS trading, or through capital savings, e.g. lower interest loans and green bonds tied to environmental and social performance) and pass back along the supply chain a proportion of that gained capital to: i) acquire the environmental and social data needed for reporting against the capital conditions; ii) invest in the development and use of technologies to capture and transact environmental and social impact data. Read more information.

Develop a standard vocabulary/ontology for food system impact valuation

Common terms are used in different ways, not only causing confusion but also obscuring the relationships between concepts and variables. Data scientists use ontologies, which are vocabularies and relationships between terms, to make data sources interoperable and connect them.

Social and legal research on the potential and barriers to use of true-cost public procurement.

Including an examination of roadblocks – procurer burden, company burden, supply chain issues, equity issues (SMB versus large procurers) and estimates of the potential contribution to food system transformation of true cost food procurement. Read more information.

Research on major changes in subsidies, tariffs and taxes in the agri-food sector in the UK or an EU economy.

Valuation enables the argument of how much subsidy and tariffs should be shifted between agri-food sectors to internalise externalities. The fiscal mechanisms are adjusted so that a sustainable food system producing healthy food becomes efficient.

Research on marginal abatement cost curves for food system external costs to engage global and national policy.

Climate science has engaged global society through clear framing of a target, e.g. “2 degrees”, and a merit order of political and economic action to achieve that target through marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) linking cost and GHG emissions reduction. MACCs have drawbacks, but they have enabled a science-based policy dialogue around transition and transformation. Food has no clear equivalent, in terms of either an easily communicated target and a merit order of global actions. Developing MACCs for food enables estimates and communicates what efficiencies in the food sector and market-based mechanisms can achieve toward food system transformation targets and how much leverage is required of public intervention. Which interventions, in what merit order and how much they are likely to cost.

We welcome secondments from business interested in development of staff or knowledge in food impact valuation. Get in touch if you have projects in mind or wish to discuss and develop a project.

For a small bench fee, seconded staff can be hosted by the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

We can produce short reports for civil or industry groups. An example is a report indicating what investors should be looking for in corporate impact statements.