There are several observatory platforms at EU level on food and nutrition, e.g., on (including Eurostat), sugar, meat, fruits and vegetable, and on broader food-related scopes e.g., market globally, agriculture, crops, health systems, etc., and on food transformation as well. Several H2020 funded projects propose pertinent data on CRFS (see table section “Synergies and uptakes”), spanning from policy developments e.g., PoliRural (818496, started 01.06.2019 and ends 31.05.2022) to EU pilot city labs e.g., ‘FoodSHIFT2030’. City-based policy and innovation labs develop across the world and the EU, the latter led by Nordic countries and large networks such as the Climate KIC, EU-funded EIT Food and the MUFPP, and delivers evidence and practice on a vast panoply of food and nutrition related issues. The MUFPP gathers 209 cities and building and proposes a framework of 44 key indicators organised in 6 relevant categories currently piloted by 3 cities (experiences started in 2019 only).
Cities2030 activate new cities and accelerates MUFPP practices combining with other pertinent insight from key agents of the CRFS at EU level (mentioned earlier), whilst generating synergies with EU funded initiatives (H2020 essentially, but also PRIMA, Interreg, the BlueBio COFUND, EIT Food, URBACT, COST, Eurostar and ERASMUS+ programmes, to name but these few). Especially, Cities2030 leverage the key findings of 100+ selected practices from the MUFPP, the Nordic Co operation (Nordic food policy lab), Climate KIC and from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, to structure and generate a CRFS intelligence platform supported by a solid network of CRFS agents, the CRFS Alliance, which mission is to deliver a structured, harmonized and actionable knowledge data repository.
The main aim of synergies is to structure meaningful interactions, combining joint-efforts to enhance and optimise the use of resources, ensure alignment with all applicable frameworks, strengthen cooperative mechanisms between all actors of the value chains, and foster place-based funding instruments for innovation frameworks and policy enhancement, thus ensuring a higher impact of all initiatives, generating significant socioeconomic impacts.
The action plan covers:
a) sharing information on the projects’ developments on a trimestral basis (tentative calendar) to facilitate knowledge sharing and two-ways transfers;
b) identifying and organising joint-activities to generate co-created results (alignments);
c) structuring the production of results to ensure they are complementary and built upon each other;
d) organising joint-activities for the dissemination and exploitation of the projects results.
