Abstract

Climate change is a major threat to human wellbeing and planetary health. Rising temperatures already have a severe impact on agriculture, jeopardising food safety and nutrition for millions of people, according to the latest IPCC report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. More frequent and more extreme droughts and floods are causing acute food and water insecurity in several regions of the world and if emissions of climate gases continue to rise, current farmland will become increasingly unsuitable for agriculture. Also, forest production is facing challenges due to rising temperatures with pests and tree deaths severely hampering production potential in some areas.

Education plays a key role to meet the threats of climate change and to support a transition to more sustainable production of food and other bio-based products. Education, including transdisciplinary, learner-centred, and challenge-based approaches is an important means to make learners prepared to address links among production, economic, and societal issues with environmental degradation, and
be ready to take responsible action that will contribute to a more sustainable world. By incorporating change-oriented projects and involving a wide variety of stakeholders in the process of learning, students are presented with problems and situations similar to what they will have to deal with later in their professional lives.

NextFOOD was initiated in 2018 as a collaborative project bringing together 19 partners in an international network with the aim of designing a research-based learning strategy to enhance learner understanding of complex situations and develop the competencies needed to drive the transition towards more sustainable agri-food and forestry systems (www.Nextfood-project.eu). Central to the project were twelve case studies that involved the implementation of action learning approaches in practice, in the context of courses and
programs related to food, agriculture, and forestry, covering a wide geographical area and different levels of education. Our research interest was to identify and implement strategies to overcome the barriers presented to students, teachers, and institutions engaging in action-oriented education.

With this book, where research outcomes and case studies of NextFOOD are briefly presented, we hope to inspire teachers, students and others with a role in education to become a part of the transformation towards student-centred and action-oriented sustainability education.

Published in

Publisher: Strategic Project Management Office (SPMO), American Farm School (AFS)

SLU Editors

• Melin, Martin

  • Department of People and Society, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Management
Pedagogical Work
Other Social Sciences not elsewhere specified


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/119249