Hestia (University of Oxford)

A scientific open data platform to tackle agriculture's environmental impacts

Agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change, tropical deforestation, the extinction of wild animals, water pollution, water use, and pesticide toxicity. There is an urgent need to reduce these environmental impacts while ensuring food for the 10 billion people on earth in 2050.

To address these challenges, it will be critical to enable farmers and food processors to measure and reduce their environmental impacts. It will also be critical to make reliable data on the environmental impacts of food products easily available.

Our goals are to:

1. Standardise how agri-environmental data is represented;
2. Make high-quality data about the productivity and environmental sustainability of different agricultural practices and different food products readily and freely available;
3. Enable farmers and food processors worldwide to measure their environmental impacts (such as their greenhouse gas emissions or pesticide toxicity) and receive advice on how to improve them.