Abstract: Climate change obviously has the potential to create direct impacts on health through exposure to the local hazards of heat or storm. However, perhaps the largest challenge will come from hazards elsewhere, where the risks are indirect and cascade across borders and sectors. Such risks may influence food supply and price (and thus food security), or impact on people movement (and the knock-on effects to migrant’s destination communities). Ultimately, climate change and environmental degradation have the potential to increase conflict, and contestation, and lead to socio-economic changes that will impact on health systems. In this talk, I will explore the interaction between climate change, food systems and public health and argue that part of the solution involves transforming our food system to both build greater resilience and improve public health through nutrition.
Bio: Professor Tim G. Benton leads the Environment and Society Programme at Chatham House. He joined Chatham House in 2016 as a distinguished visiting fellow, at which time he was also dean of strategic research initiatives at the University of Leeds.From 2011-2016 he was the ‘champion’ of the UK’s Global Food Security programme which was a multi-agency partnership of the UK’s public bodies (government departments, devolved governments and research councils) with an interest in the challenges around food.
He has worked with UK governments, the EU and G20. He has been a global agenda steward of the World Economic Forum, and is an author of the IPCC’s Special Report on Food, Land and Climate (2019), and the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment (2017, 2022).He has published more than 150 academic papers, many tackling how systems respond to environmental change. His work on sustainability leadership has been recognized with an honorary fellowship of the UK’s Society for the Environment, and a doctorate honoris causa from the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.