Food security is based on three pillars: quantity, quality and culture in respect of the right to food. Food and nutrition security must ensure the good coverage of nutritional requirements for health maintenance and disease prevention (obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease). The prevalence of such diet-related diseases is high and increasing in the Mediterranean basin. In an area where natural resources already suffer from climate and population pressures, the agro-food systems thus more than ever have to deal with the need for quality. Based on several studies, especially the ‘Seven Countries Study’, the Mediterranean diet became a model of healthy diet to prevent coronary heart diseases. However, although many Mediterranean products are available, their share in the population’s diet has impressively dropped during the last decades. A good coverage of nutrient requirements is based on foods with a high nutritional density that can be attained by a higher consumption of diverse Mediterranean traditional foods. In the current context of widespread consumption of energy-dense/nutrient-poor foods, a valorisation of the nutritional qualities of Mediterranean foods becomes an important issue for the agro-food system. Besides nutritional quality, foods include many other dimensions such as hedonism, convenience, safety, plus environmental and social requirements, and all are important to integrate in order to achieve sustainable food systems capable of sustaining food security and health. Our project addresses the following questions: how to ensure quantitative and qualitative food security in the Mediterranean countries? What would be the impacts on the organization of food chains, from the distribution up to the production sector? How to keep a place for locally produced traditional Mediterranean foods in a context of strong urbanization and globalization of the agro-food trade? Medina project is based on the idea that the food supply is a major determinant of the consumption behaviours. From there, the objective of the project is to build scenarios and propose solutions to maximise agro-food chains’ contribution to human health and nutrition in a sustainable way. The first originality of Medina project is the “fork to farm” approach. We propose to work on existing data from surveys obtained in three contrasted areas in terms of food systems and consumption behaviours: South-East of France (the Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions), the ‘Greater Tunis’ metropolis urban zone and the ‘Sidi Bouzid’ rural area in central Tunisia. Other data will be generated on foods (nutritional quality, prices, carbon and water footprints) and on food chain systems (socio-economical data). The second originality is the use of combination of modelling tools (linear programming and computable general equilibrium models) to integrate collected data and generates scenarios. To achieve our objective, Medina consortium was built to get a multidisciplinary expertise in nutrition, food science, agronomy and economy. The project is divided into 4 main tasks: (T1) data collection on food consumption and characterization: extraction of existing data, generation of primary data, harmonization and aggregation for use in models (T2) model building for integration (T3) analysis of food chains for nutritional added value at various stages (T4) data integration and elaboration of scenarios and feasible solutions for better nutrition and health in the different situations. Finally, we propose to disseminate results to target groups (international scientific community; economic stakeholders along the food chains, agriculture, food and health policy and decision makers, the general public, higher education institutes).

Effective community-based management of common pool resources (CPR) in contexts facing environmental degradation and social conflict is urgently required to sustainably move people worldwide towards a decent level of human well-being, as sought in the Sustainable Development Goals. In the seasonally dry tropics, water stored in reservoirs. co-managed by communities and state water management agencies, can transform the lives of people in areas of persistent poverty by providing dry season income and food security through fish, livestock and crop production. Yet the inequitable distribution of water and other agricultural resources leads to stark inequalities in costs and benefits of reservoirs among households and communities. This project will convene stakeholders around two reservoirs in Boulgou province, Burkina Faso, through 'Innovation Platforms' (IPs) that provide spaces for face-to-face learning, exchange and negotiation. Through the IPs, differentiated stakeholders with conflicts of interests related to reservoirs will identify, compare and implement community-driven innovations to make management of and access to land, water and associated benefits more equitable and sustainable. In collaboration with local communities and water management institutes, we will co- design and test locally relevant indicators and novel data collection techniques to establish a reliable, locally owned reservoir resource monitoring system. Students, extension workers and government technicians will be trained on automatic weather stations, mobile phone based surveys, and easily measured indicators of soil and water quality. The project will fill gaps in knowledge regarding factors and approaches that enable the resolution of conflicts related to the management of CPR and the development of participatory monitoring systems. Academic beneficiaries include scientists working on participatory approaches, conflict resolution, social equity, and CPR management.

This Challenge Cluster aims to enable Ethiopia to realise the potential of its abundant and unique plant diversity to address global challenges in food security, health and nutrition, poverty and displacement. To this end, it will conduct research and capacity-building to identify and manage areas of high plant diversity, develop value chains around currently underutilised plants, and critically evaluate the roles that plant diversity can play in addressing development challenges. Ethiopia faces multiple interacting development challenges linked to environmental change and degradation, of which food insecurity is central. Over 85% of the population depends upon rainfed agriculture, which is highly vulnerable to climatic, social and political shocks, as demonstrated by severe famine in recent decades. From a population of >108 million, a third of have insufficient food to eat and a quarter live below the national poverty line. Malnutrition is causing stunting and other health problems, impacting the lives of millions of individuals. Food insecurity is also contributing to political and resource-based conflict and human displacement that affects over 2 million Ethiopians. Climate change will exacerbate these problems by reducing agricultural productivity through increased drought and heat stress, creating an urgent need to identify and develop crop varieties adapted to the new conditions. As a hotspot for plant diversity (both wild plants and domesticated crops), Ethiopia harbours biological resources that could play important roles in solving these challenges. For example, current research within the Cluster is uncovering varieties of enset (the principal starch staple for 20 million Ethiopians) with high content of essential micronutrients zinc and iron that can potentially help to address chronic malnutrition. Further crop varieties possessing resilience to climatic stressors and other valuable traits are almost certainly waiting to be discovered by science. Likewise, wild plant diversity likely contains genetic resources that can be used in crop improvement and to develop value chains that create economic opportunities for poor rural communities. The opportunity to apply Ethiopia's indigenous plant diversity to address development challenges is rapidly diminishing, however, as wild and domesticated plant diversity is lost to the conversion and degradation of natural habitats and the homogenisation of agricultural landscapes. Research is urgently needed to identify and manage the most important remaining hotspots of Ethiopian plant diversity, and the Ethiopian government has invited Kew to support Ethiopian scientists in this effort. Building upon a 30+ year history of successful UK-Ethiopia collaboration, the goal of this Cluster is to realise the potential of Ethiopia's plant diversity to address poverty, food insecurity and climate change vulnerability. Toward this goal, we aim to achieve the following objectives: Objective 1: Identify and map hotspots of Ethiopian wild and domesticated plant diversity and provide recommendations to the Government of Ethiopia for the designation and management of these areas. Objective 2: Identify and characterise bioresources with valuable traits to enable the development of value chains around currently underutilised plants in a way that benefits the poorest sectors of society. Objective 3: Evaluate the actual and perceived socio-economic impacts of areas of high wild and domesticated plant diversity to inform sustainable and equitable management of these areas. Objective 4: Critically evaluate the role that areas of high wild and domesticated plant diversity and associated plant-product value chains play in addressing broader local and regional development challenges. Objective 5: Enhance the capacity of Ethiopian and UK-based researchers to conduct research and associated activities that support the conservation and sustainable use of Ethiopian plant diversity.

As the world's most productive crop, the history and potential of rice is of great interest to crop scientists and archaeologists, and as a greenhouse gas producer its history is important to climatic modelling. Understanding the development, diversification and spread of rice agriculture is central not only to our understanding of the processes of human population growth, dispersal and formation of civi-lizations in Asia, it is also central to reconstructing how past agricultural activities might have im-pacted global climate through methane emissions and deforestation. Archaeobotanical evidence offers a powerful set of tools for not only documenting where and when rice was cultivated in the past, but how it was cultivated through the analysis of ecology of associated weed flora in macro-remains assemblages and phytolith assemblages. We have pio-neered the study archaeological rice weed flora and the combination of archaeological plant macro-remains and phytoliths in our recent NERC-supported research in parts of India, Sri Lanka and China (NE/G005540/1). We propose to roll out this method over a wider geographical and cultural area, as well refining the approach through some additional modern analogues. we propose to focus our work on the less known parts of Asia, especially mainland Southeast Asia and the southern parts of China, as well as further work in the eastern parts of India. These regions are central to hypotheses on the dispersal of rice cultivation, including models linking the spread of rice to major language families such as Austroasiatic and Austronesian, and yet a lack systematically-studied evidence for rice cultivation itself, or evidence as to whether early rice represented an extension of the alluvial wetland cultivation systems like those of the Neolithic Yangtze (early subspecies japonica, typical of many modern temperate japonica) or the develop-ment of upland rainfed systems (the latter typical of many modern tropical japonica rices), with a secondary later parallel evolution of irrigated wet rice systems amongst indica rices. Therefore we will use a combination of archaeobotanical seed remains, including weed flora, and phytoliths to reconstruct the earliest rice cultivation systems (Neolithic-Bronze Age) along the three hypothesized trajectories of rice diffusion southwards from the Yangtze basin towards south-east Asia, namely in Yunnan, Guangdong, and Fujian, as well as across a range of subregions, environments and periods in mainland Southeast Asia (mainly in Thailand and Vietnam) to assess the extent to which rainfed and wet irrigated systems were practiced, and whether different regional patterns or a single evolutionary trajectory can be reconstructed.On the basis of our reconstructed rice arable systems and weed flora assemblages to as-sess the likelihood of single or multiple pathways for the spread of rice into Southeast Asia, by analysing the geographical and chronological patterns of weed flora. We will then use our improved understanding of how rice was cultivated in different times and periods of southern China and Southeastern Asia to produce improved models of past wetland rice area and linked methane emissions over time, grounded in the empirical evidence for past rice cultivation. Results will be of direct relevance to prehistorians and quaternary scientists interested in Holocene Asia and rice agriculture, but such results will have a wider impact in terms of assessing the regional and global impact, and sustainability, of different traditions of rice agriculture, and its contribution to ancient anthropogenic methane emissions.