News 2020
Funding for SUSTAIN-COCOA project
We are pleased to announce that the SAE Group through members, William Thompson and Johan Six, will be collaborating in the recently funded SUSTAIN-COCOA project. The three-year project seeks to evaluate and inform sustainable sourcing policies for biodiversity protection, climate mitigation, and improved livelihoods in the cocoa sector, in West Africa. The project, part of the European BioDivERsA initiative, will involve collaboration at ETH with the Environmental Policy Group of Rachael Garrett (PI of the project) and the Ecovision Lab of Jan Wegner. Beyond ETH, the project will benefit from international collaborations with UC Louvain, Stockholm Environment Institute, Alliance CIAT-Bioversity and University of Queensland.
Join us for our online course (3 days) on "Designing for Food Systems Resilience: A Circular Approach"
Together with the World Food Systems Center (WFSC), the SAE group is offering this exciting opportunity to learn together how to use systemic and transdisciplinary approaches to transform waste into resources, close loops, create shared value and leverage interconnections to design interventions that build resilience.
Date & Time: 10 February 2021 to 12 February 2021 / 9:00 - 17:00 CET
For more information and registration.
Looking forward to seeing you!
Kristýna Kantnerová awarded the METAS Award 2021 by the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS)
Congratulations to Kristýna for having her work in the field of metrology of clumped isotopes of nitrous oxides recognized by this award!
Highly Cited Researchers 2020
We congratulate Johan! He has again been included in the list of «external pageHighly Cited Researchers 2020». The list of "Highly Cited Researchers 2020" comprises the scientists worldwide whose publications are among the top one percent of the most frequently cited papers in their field. In 2020, there are 6,167 researchers worldwide, including 154 from Switzerland. Of the most cited researchers, 12 belong to ETH Zurich, 5 of them to the department D-USYS.
Sainsbury's collaborates with SAE researchers to enhance the resilience of the banana supply chain
Sainsbury's, one of the UK's leading supermarkets, published an external pagearticle on how they aim to enhance the resilience of the banana supply chain by working with researchers from ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, University of Bergen, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC) and the University of Exeter.
Sharing research insights by storytelling
The Sustainable Agroecosystems group has received funding for the new science communication project “Edible research goes storytelling: Participative design of an interactive art-science exhibition on food value chains.”
Stories can help us to personally make sense of complex issues, as they enable us to better identify with the topics addressed. In relation to the food system, stories can also help to raise our awareness on the roles and challenges of different actors within this system, such as farmers, processors, retailers, and consumers. The dialogue that is part of the process of storytelling can foster insight, respect, inclusion, and engagement.
The goal of new “Edible research goes storytelling” project will be to jointly design and implement an interactive exhibition on food system stories by Swiss secondary school students and scientists. The exhibition will be an installation that consists of large displays with photographs representing the main components of the food value chain, i.e. agricultural production, processing, retailing, and consumption – from field to fork. The stories behind these photographs will be brought to life through augmented reality features such as videos, audio, and illustrations.
In order to develop this interactive exhibition, the Sustainable Agroecosystems group will collaborate with a professional writer, a media artist, four pilot classes (approx. 100 Swiss secondary school students), and the ETH Game Technology Center. The project starts with a series of storytelling workshops for scientists and secondary school students, in which the participants draft storyboards related to the research conducted by the Sustainable Agroecosystems group.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project start is currently delayed. The official starting date for the project is now February 2021.
Tackling the challenges of sustainable cocoa farming
Throughout the 2010s there were fears of a looming chocolate shortage. Though demand has been steadily increasing for 50 years, production decreased by around five per cent from the early part of the decade. The SAE group researches on how the entire cocoa supply chain can become both more resilient and sustainable. Read more here.