Food and nutrition security (FNS) is about ensuring that everybody can access sufficient, affordable and nutritious food. A big challenge that Europe faces is that a vast amount of FNS resources is fragmented. The main aim of the EU-funded FNS-Cloud project is to overcome fragmentation by federating FNS data on diet, health, and consumer behaviour as well as sustainable agriculture and the bio-economy. The implemented cloud solution will increase the exploitation of FNS knowledge and will contribute to reducing knowledge gaps that inhibit public health and agricultural policy. Furthermore, it will support the food industry in reducing development and production costs and increasing sustainable production. Ultimately, the cloud solution will facilitate informed and healthy choices by consumers.

Objective

FNS-Cloud will overcome fragmentation problems by integrating existing FNS data, which is essential for high-end, pan-European FNS research, addressing FNS, diet, health, and consumer behaviours as well as on sustainable agriculture and the bio-economy. Current fragmented FNS resources not only result in knowledge gaps that inhibit public health and agricultural policy, and the food industry from developing effective solutions, making production sustainable and consumption healthier, but also do not enable exploitation of FNS knowledge for the benefit of European citizens.

FNS-Cloud will, through three Demonstrators; Agri-Food, Nutrition & Lifestyle and NCDs & the Microbiome to facilitate:

1. Analyses of regional and country-specific differences in diet including nutrition, (epi)genetics, microbiota, consumer behaviours, culture and lifestyle and their effects on health (obesity, NCDs, ethnic and traditional foods), which are essential for public health and agri-food and health policies;
2. Improved understanding agricultural differences within Europe and what these means in terms of creating a sustainable, resilient food systems for healthy diets; and
3. Clear definitions of boundaries and how these affect the compositions of foods and consumer choices and, ultimately, personal and public health in the future.

Long-term sustainability of the FNS-Cloud will be based on Services that have the capacity to link with new resources and enable cross-talk amongst them; access to FNS-Cloud data will be open access, underpinned by FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable).

FNS-Cloud will work closely with the proposed Food, Nutrition and Health Research Infrastructure (FNHRI) as well as METROFOOD-RI and other existing ESFRI RIs (e.g. ELIXIR, ECRIN) in which several FNS-Cloud Beneficiaries are involved directly.

Project information:

• Website: www.fns-cloud.eu
• Project coordinator: RTDS - VEREIN ZUR FORDERUNG DER KOMMUNIKATION UND VERMITTLUNG VON FORSCHUNG, TECHNOLOGIE UND INNOVATION (RTDS VEREIN, ENGL. RTDS ASSOCIATION)
• Duration: 1 October 2019 - 30 September 2023
• Funding program: European Union’s Horizon 2020
• Grant agreement no.: 863059