4CF The Futures Literacy Company is a consultancy entirely focused on strategic foresight and long-term strategies. For nearly two decades, 4CF has been on the mission to help its clients prepare for an uncertain tomorrow. The Company has executed hundreds of projects for private companies, public institutions and international entities, including the European Commission and its agencies (EUDA, ENISA), FAO, UNFCCC, UNESCO, UNEP and UNDP. 4CF is at the forefront of global innovation, and actively contributes to the development of cutting-edge foresight tools, including 4CF HalnyX (Delphi platform), 4CF Sprawlr, 4CF FLEx.

The vision of FOSTER is to build a foundation from which a new Knowledge and Innovation System (KIS) for Europe’s food system can emerge. The current structure is insufficient to address the emerging challenges of nourishing people in a healthy and sustainable way. Key objective is to gain insights into how it can be built to be more inclusive and better governed. 

FOSTER shall help to transform Europe’s food system outcomes and will achieve this by: 

• building a FOSTER Platform including food system-state of the art knowledge, foresight by semi-automated Horizon scanning, trend and threats-analysis and new multi-dimensional scenarios of EU food systems to 2040; 
• implementing the FOSTER Academy – including four Summer Schools – for integrating food system-related disciplines and citizen science to enhance food system understanding across the ERA; 
• initiating and assessing a co-creation and co-learning process within six national resp. regional Citizen Driven Initiatives (CDIs), in which new knowledge, strategies and Action Research Agendas are gained; 
• scaling out and deep CDIs solutions and approaches to other territorial contexts; 
• studying different R&I mechanisms of policy support for mission-oriented R&I policy for food systems transformation, and analysing and ground-proofing them in each CDI; 
• strengthening science-policy interfaces by co-learning processes with external experts and developing recommendations for food systems R&I policies tailored to different geographies and sectors; 
• identifying the trigger points to help ‘unlock’ system lock-ins and support further dynamics towards system transformation; 
• and applying reflective monitoring on all FOSTER’s co-learning activities to develop insights into how the KIS can be broadened from an agricultural-KIS to a food system-KIS.
  

To inspire adoption of FOSTER learnings, over 20 workshops and a final conference will be conducted; scientific position papers and policy briefs will be widely communicated. 

Considering prevalent trends, such as population growth, increasing demand for animal protein, land use change, and resource scarcity, a blueprint for future crops may help prioritise sustainable and efficient agriculture practices, as well as improved food systems. CropBooster-P, funded under the Horizon 2020 Programme, is a project that aimed to find a solution to this question by looking into innovative crop-breeding technologies for improving climate adaptability, resource use efficiency, yield, and quality.

Results for the working group Food are available at: http://foresight.cnr.it/working-groups/wg-food.html 

SF4S is a collaborative action with partners from Higher Education institutions (HEIs), Vocational Education and Training (VET) providers, innovation networks and business entities from the Agri-food, Health and the Mobility sectors.

Carried out between July 2022 - June 2025, SF4S supports our transition to a more sustainable European economy by helping to address the lack of green, digital and future (i.e. sustainability foresight) skills among students and professionals and by connecting knowledge flows between HEI, VET and industry actors that are necessary for Europe to develop cooperative solutions on a large-scale and support the recommendations for action in the major reports and initiatives: Green Deal, NextGenerationEU, European Skills Agenda and OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030.