Forschungsprofil der TRA Sustainable Futures

Agriculture, Climate, and Ecosystems

Agriculture is the main source of nutrients and biomass for an increasingly diverse range of uses in our globally connected economies. But, agriculture also contributes to climate change and the degradation of ecosystems through land use change, soil erosion, excessive water use, and pollution. These undesirable environmental impacts of agriculture are increasingly turning into risks for agricultural production itself. For example, farmers struggle to maintain crop yields on degraded soils and uncertain climate conditions, and the elevated use of agrochemicals threatens human health and the environment.

Research under this research domain focuses on reducing these and other sustainability tradeoffs resulting from agricultural production as a basis for providing sustainable healthy diets and other bio-based products. We bridge across relevant scales from processes at cell-level in the crop and animal sciences to the plant, field, and farm-levels as well as the ecosystem scale, fostering close collaboration between natural sciences, engineering, economics, and social sciences. This includes, for example, research on (1) new drought-resistant crop varieties, (2) carbon-farming practices, (3) alternative field arrangement to increase agrobiodiversity, (4) animal welfare, and (5) monitoring and modeling systems to measure and predict the eco-efficiency of agricultural production systems.  

Our research aims at providing improved knowledge for the design of resilient and productive agricultural systems that minimize negative impacts on the climate, ecosystems, and human health. Through regular engagement with stakeholders, such as farmers, industry representatives, and policy makers, we seek to develop and upscale improved management and technology-based solutions for more sustainable agricultural production systems.  

Sustainable Healthy Diets

Current diets are unsustainable at global and local scales and the idea of sustainable healthy diets is linked to a range of SDGs. Sustainable diets are defined as “those diets with low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and to healthy life for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable; nutritionally adequate, safe and healthy; while optimizing natural and human resources.” In fact, many people worldwide consume unhealthy diets and suffer from diet related diseases. The triple burden of malnutrition describes undernutrition, nutrient deficiencies and chronic disease risk which can all be linked to unfavorable dietary intake. At the same time, agricultural practices for the production of both food and non-food biomass have large environmental impacts. In this theme research addresses all elements of the food system interconnected to serve sustainable healthy diets.  

Research in this research domain is largely interdisciplinary taking a holistic food systems perspective, from production to consumption and health. Along with a number of studies and research projects into the different food system perspectives this is underpinned by long-term cohort studies into diets and health that are led by Bonn University in the Global North and those newly to be set-up in the Global South which investigate the human health outcomes.

Our research aims at finding food system solutions for sustainable healthy diets. Here, we explicitly take a worldwide perspective, because of the interconnectedness of the food systems actors and the different positive and negative relationships/feedback loops across countries and regions.

Transformative Technologies

Technological advancements have the potential to bring us closer to the SDGs by providing new solutions to current problems. New developments on high-precision and/or distributed sensing, data interpretation technology and autonomous actions will allow for a more detailed view of our environment, leading to improved model building capability, which in turn leads to improved planning, control and thus increased efficiency of using resources. Given such data, novel process-based or data-driven approaches have the potential to integrate different types of information and to build models that increase our basic understanding of the phenomena in nature or society, allowing us to avoid detrimental effects before they even occur. One central aspects of this research area is monitoring and action execution in agricultural systems along the spatial and temporal dimension ranging from individual plants over fields to regions using ground and aerial vehicles up to remote sensing satellites. Such data also allows for automated intervention through autonomous robots reducing the amount of needed agro-chemicals and for the design of new sustainable cropping systems through new field arrangements.  This approach will lead to methods improving crop and food production, resilience with respect to diseases and climate change, biodiversity, and optimizing the resource use efficiency. Another aspect is the observation of the earth system, especially the global and regional water cycle, leading to better understanding of climate change impact.

Research for developing bio-friendly materials offers the great potential to reduce the future impact of humans onto the environment. This cross-cutting research area includes new techniques to develop biologically safe products, to avoid the production of waste, to increase the amount of renewable material feedstocks and energy sources in production and reduce the amount of toxic substances. New technologies also address the societal changes, risks, and resulting challenges towards long-term sustainability. This includes the automation of various tasks for humans in an aging society such as health care, personal transportation, and service robotics, but also techniques for maintaining privacy in a digital and interconnected society.  

Societal Change and Innovations

For humanity to thrive further within planetary boundaries, enormous behavioral changes are needed at the level of individuals and society. Technological innovation is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to enable transformative changes at societal scale. Sustainable transformation also critically depends on strategic and adaptive governance to steer processes of change and ensure a fair benefit and burden sharing. Designing and successfully implementing transformative governance can be considered a process of “societal innovation” and involves multiple ethical dilemmas.   

Our research under this cross-cutting research area spans across multiple disciplines from the social sciences, often in close collaboration with natural scientists and engineers. It ranges from theoretical approaches in philosophy, sociology, and economics to very applied work by human geographers and agricultural economists in culturally very diverse world regions. This includes, for example, historical and scenario-based research on how individual and collective behavior interacts with the bio-physical environment in shaping both intended and unintended future outcomes. It also involves experimental and observational research to improve our understanding of human behavior and the direct and indirect impacts of technological change and policies on the food system.  

Transdisciplinary research approaches under this research area involve co-design processes, where both the research design and the development of solutions and policy recommendation are informed by interactions with stakeholders. In doing so, we seek to contribute to societal innovations that enable more sustainable production and consumption patterns in the global bioeconomy.