Mission of the FACT Alliance

Accelerating food and climate systems solutions around the world

The mission of the FACT Alliance is to transform the sustainability of food systems through collaborative, actionable research.

Central to the work of the FACT Alliance is the development of new methodologies for aligning data across scales and food systems components, improving data access, integrating research across the diverse disciplines that address aspects of food systems, making stakeholders partners in the research process, and assessing impact in the context of complex and interconnected food and climate systems.
 

The FACT Alliance is working to: 

We bring together research and stakeholder communities from the governmental, non-profit, farming, and private sectors to identify knowledge gaps, high priority research needs, and collaborative responses to them.

We use a combination of existing modeling approaches to show which aspects of the current food system may be vulnerable to future systemic change. These models can also help to identify how future scenarios may present opportunities for transformation.

We identify natural, technical, engineering, and social science knowledge gaps and barriers, as well as opportunities for transforming food systems. We do this through iterative stakeholder workshops, interviews, and/or questionnaires.

We use an iterative, stakeholder-driven framework that is adaptable to collaboration on a variety of topics, and across different scales and geographies. This process, known as convergence research, identifies the knowledge gaps that impede food systems transitions to develop stakeholder-driven, evidenced-based, systems-oriented solutions. The framework applies: 

  • A food systems approach that spans the scope of ‘farm to table’ and works at different scales and across different settings – fostering participatory, transdisciplinary research partnerships with stakeholders and integrating the natural, biological, and social sciences, as well as multidisciplinary fields such as sustainability science, data science and information management, and applied ethics;
     
  • Expert facilitation, bringing together funders, researchers, and other stakeholders to jointly identify research needs and scalable solutions. 

Through our work, our team is developing new approaches to measuring impact in complex and interrelated systems to ensure that the strategies for transforming food systems are achieving sustainability, resilience, economic, and health goals. We are also identify crucial strategies to overcome existing barriers to data access, dissemination, and compatibility that hinder decision making, policy assessment, progress monitoring, and supporting research efforts.

Our members are catalyzing concrete interventions for policy and investment decisions, technology development and scaling, consumer behavior, and supply chains.