On 7 October 2025, WP2 leader UCL convened task leaders and partner institutions for an online catch-up meeting to review progress and plan next steps in developing the project’s comprehensive assessment toolbox.
WP2 aims to deliver a suite of health, environmental, social, and economic assessment modules. These will be linked to extended versions of key agri-food system models — AGMEMOD, CAPRI, GLOBIOM, and MAGNET — while also functioning as stand-alone analytical tools with associated databases.
The meeting provided an opportunity to review the status of work across three main tasks:
Task 2.1 – Health Assessment Module: This module, led by UCL, aims to quantify nutrition and diet-related health outcomes, building on food system indicators defined in WP1. It links dietary consumption data with country-specific nutrient profiles and mortality statistics to assess nutrition supply and disease burden from diet-related risks such as heart disease, stroke, and type-2 diabetes. The module’s outputs will later be connected to economic models to evaluate social sustainability effects.
Task 2.2 – Environmental Assessment Modules: This work stream, led by IIASA, is developing several data-driven modules to assess environmental sustainability, including: GHG emissions: ensuring consistency with national inventories and global datasets. Air pollution: quantifying the health impacts of agricultural and food system emissions. Water pollution: linking economic and hydrological models to assess nutrient runoff and water quality. Biodiversity: downscaling land-use changes to grid-level biodiversity indicators. Together, these modules will form a repository of satellite accounts connected to the project’s data repositories and modelling work in WP6.
Task 2.3 – Socio-Economic Assessment Module: This module, led by WSER, explores social and economic dimensions of food system transitions, including household food access, employment, and income inequality. It draws on micro- and macro-economic data and explores the use of a microsimulation model to analyse distributional effects. The resulting “welfare module” will support CAP post-2027 policy assessments.
During the meeting, partners exchanged insights on methodological alignment, data interoperability, and upcoming integration steps with WP4 (Data Repositories) and WP6 (Model Coupling). The discussions highlighted the importance of harmonised approaches across models and modules to ensure robust and policy-relevant sustainability assessments.
The WP2 team will continue refining the toolbox design to support the integrated modelling framework at the core of ACT4CAP27, contributing essential insights to assess future agricultural and food policy pathways.
