START Strategy
The START centre ensures interdisciplinary collaboration among academic researchers in Denmark together with international partners. It will secure constant updating and upgrading of research infrastructure and access to living labs and drive the research forward to bring society closer to the SDG’s.
Strategic research, targeted on structural and systemic longer-term solutions, plays a key role in developing the tools and strategies unlocking green transitions of the agrifood systems. This requires an integrative approach of technical innovation and societal transformation. START will provide a science driven and academic foundation for innovation activities and a focus on long-term solutions in the agrifood domain.
The challenges at hand are too great for a narrow approach. The power of further enhancing the cooperation of scientists from a broad diversity of disciplines, with inclusion of stakeholders from a broad actor´s perspective, enables START to create realistic future solutions together. By sharing expertise and facilities, we can create more impact even faster.
START stands for excellence through a united entry point for research collaboration attractive for partners at national and international scale. The centre is mission driven and will carry out activities that will strengthen research collaboration nationally as well as internationally within natural sciences including technologies, fully integrated with social sciences including humanities, socioeconomics and arts.
The START centre is a target oriented academic research community that has united the Danish universities, around the domain of agrifood research: Aarhus University, Copenhagen University, Aalborg University, Copenhagen Business School, IT University of Copenhagen, Roskilde University, Technical University of Denmark, and University of Southern Denmark.
Denmark has the proposition to be the European living lab to highlight the envisaged transition of European agrifood systems. START ensures that Danish R&D will be an attractive and essential lead partner in European interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral R&D towards a systematically integrated transition and transformation of agrifood systems.
Did you know?
Our bottom line is to work in compliance with the national ambitions and targets for sustainability in agrifood systems in Denmark, in line with agreed international goals and objectives (UN-SDGs and EC-Green Deal with Farm-to-Fork strategy):
- Climate: 70% reduction by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050.
- Nutrients: Reducing nutrient losses for meeting requirements of the Water Framework Directive and the National Emissions Ceilings Directive.
- Farm-to-fork strategy with goals for food safety, nutrition, circularity etc.
- Pesticides: Reduce pesticide use by at least 50% and avoid use that may harm water resources and biodiversity.
- Biodiversity: Contribute to turning 30% of Europe’s land into protected areas and enhance biodiversity and pollinators in the agricultural landscape.
- Food: Enhance production to deliver 45% more healthy food by 2050
- Energy and materials: Contribute to meeting the needs for substituting fossil carbon sources for energy and materials.
