Laurier professor Alison Blay-Palmer leading UN panel of experts creating resilient food systems report

Nov. 27, 2024
For Immediate Release

WATERLOO – Alison Blay-Palmer, the UNESCO Chair on Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, has been selected to lead the drafting committee for the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). The panel will present a report on building resilient food systems at the 53rd plenary session of the CFS in October 2025.

The HLPE-FSN is the United Nations body assessing the science related to global food security and nutrition. Blay-Palmer, whose UNESCO Chair appointment was recently renewed for a second term, is a respected international leader in sustainable food systems research. As drafting team lead of the HLPE-FSN, Blay-Palmer guides and supports a writing team of food systems experts from around the world to create the “Building Resilient Food Systems” report. Their collective experience spans health and nutrition, human rights, gender analysis, traditional Indigenous knowledge and environmental sciences, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of agricultural and food system vulnerabilities.

“This process will help to define resilient food system transformation for policy-makers and countries in the years to come,” said Blay-Palmer, a professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Laurier. “The report can provide a way forward for more equitable resilience across multiple dimensions of food systems.”

Blay-Palmer (centre) leading a HLPE-FSN meeting in Rome. (photo credit: Silvia Meiattini)

The HLPE-FSN team has been meeting since October 2024, including a recent in-person gathering in Rome. Learn more about the panel and its members.

Blay-Palmer is the founding director of the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars. Together with 35 partner organizations across four continents, she is currently leading the Food Learning and Growing (FLOW) Partnership. Over the next six years, FLOW research will map and monitor specific practices that are driving sustainability on a regional level and amplify them to influence meaningful, long-term policy decisions globally.