Grant: CIHR REDI Early Career Transition Award - General

The food system is a major contributor to climate change and currently failing to provide healthy and adequate diets for all. In response, jurisdictions and global organizations are committing to transforming food systems to promote healthy, sustainable, and equitable diets. To support a food system transformation, comprehensive and routine surveillance data that monitors health, climate, and equity impacts will be important for informing policy and programming decisions. Since food and nutrition data intersects with multiple disciplines, such as health and agriculture, collaboration across disciplines and sectors is also needed to ensure policy- and decision-making has benefits for both health and the planet. However, in Canada, food and nutrition surveillance activities are currently disjointed across sectors and disciplines and primarily focused on only health monitoring. The objective of this research is to strengthen food and nutrition surveillance in Canada by improving collaboration and data structures for monitoring health, climate, and equity. To understand how food and nutrition surveillance is conducted in Canada, a network analysis will be conducted to examine the system of people, groups, and organizations involved and their relationships. This network will then be engaged in interviews and a document review to assess facilitators, barriers, and opportunities for collaboration in food and nutrition surveillance and potential data gaps in monitoring health, climate, and equity impacts. Using evidence from the interviews and review, a series of design thinking workshops will be conducted with the network to develop strategies for greater collaboration across sectors and disciplines and for improving monitoring data in Canada. To ultimately support the health of Canadians and the planet, this work will shed light on opportunities to improve food and nutrition surveillance to better inform policy and programming decisions for health, climate, and equity.