We mobilise people and resources to create, curate, make sense of and use knowledge to inform policymaking across Europe.
Our tree is inspired by the work of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (see picture). It also makes reference to the ‘tree of life’ built for Milano Expo2015. It is an artificially built wooden tree, with branches representing continents or sub-continents. On each branch are hanging figures illustrating the imbalanced situation of access to food and water around the world. It is, basically, a different way of representing histograms or pie charts of data concerning this unbalanced situation in the world.
By consequence, if science asks to imagine how the ‘shape of the tree’ will be in 20, 30 … years, it is very hard to know how it will evolve. We would all dream of reaching a well-balanced situation by then, but the reality will certainly be different. It is indeed hard to estimate how cultural and religious habits, climate, and politics, will evolve and at what speed.
The questions that science poses are therefore very challenging: What will be the impact of research? What will be the impact of nutrition innovation? Of ‘functional’ food? Plant engineering? Personal dietary guidance? Reduction of food loss? Packaging? SMART agriculture? And so on…
Wooden artificially built tree sculpture designed by Philippe Loudjani.
22 May 2026 | 15 Jul 2026
