RASCAL

The RASCAL project will bring together a highly collaborative, interdisciplinary team from biological sciences, engineering, and management to co-develop intervention strategies. It will create an interactive digital lab that enables exploration of multiple scenarios involving cascade risks, and potential mitigation interventions. 

Risks to the food system include shifts in consumer demand, changing patterns in retailer sourcing, biosecurity threats, competing government policies, overseas conflicts, and climate events like floods or droughts. These factors can significantly impact production costs and future investments in infrastructure and labour. From the consumer perspective the project will investigate factors impacting economic hardship, nutritional insecurity, and associated health problems.

To achieve this, the project will follow four key stages:

1. Build interactive digital infrastructure to leverage disparate datasets to explore the balance between self-sufficiency and imports.
2. Develop new tools for understanding cascade risks and their cumulative impacts along well documented food supply chains.
3. Explore real-world scenarios, using examples of UK fruit and vegetable supply and alternative protein sources, to demonstrate how advanced modelling can evaluate the impact of cascading risks.
4. Provide intervention strategies for specific agri-food supply chains to mitigate supply chain risks through a combination of visual interactive tools and field research methods.

Niab contact

Dr Eleftheria Stavridou

Project timing

September 2024-August 2027

Partners

University of Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast; University of Plymouth

Funder

UKRI

News

UK supply chains get safeguarding boost - UKRI (7 January 2025)

ifM secures grant for major project in safeguarding food supply chains - University of Cambridge (press release - 15 January 2025)