SCI/RSC Evening Lecture: Prof Lord Krebs - Feeding the 9 billion

Synopsis

"Feeding the 9 billion"

The world population is projected to grow to 9-10 billion people by 2050 and food production will have to increase by at least 80% to meet growing demand. At the moment around one in six people on earth are not getting enough to eat or not enough of critical nutrients, while a similar number are overweight or obese as a result of eating too much. Is the answer to ending hunger therefore to redistribute food? Or is it to rely on new technologies including genetic modification of crops? Or does it depend on us all becoming vegetarians? 

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Professor Lord Krebs is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. He is an internationally renowned scientist in the field of behavioural ecology. He completed his undergraduate and DPhil degrees at Pembroke College, Oxford before taking up a post of Demonstrator in Ornithology at Oxford in 1970. He then moved to the University of British Columbia, as Assistant Professor in the Insitute of Animal Resource Ecology. He was lecturer in Zoology at the University of North Wales in Bangor, before returning to Oxford as lecturer in
Zoology and Fellow of Wolfson College, in 1976. In 1981 he became EPA Abraham Fellow of Pembroke College, and in 1988 he was appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship, which he held until 2005. Between 1994 and 1999 he was Chief Executive of the Natural Environment Research Council, and from 2000-2005 he served as the first Chairman of the Food Standards Agency. He was knighted for services to behavioural ecology in 1999 and appointed to the House of Lords as an independent crossbencher in 2007, where his particular areas of interest include environment, science, education and food. In 2007 he chaired a working party of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics to produce a report on the Ethics of Public Health. In 2009 he chaired an enquiry by the Science and Technology Select Committee into Nanotechnology and Food. 

Lord Krebs has published over 300 scientific papers and has co-authored several books including the standard student textbook in his field. In 2005 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on television. He holds 15 Honorary Degrees and numerous awards and medals for his scientific work. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is a Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, Chairman of the UK Science and Technology Honours Committee, and Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee for Science and Technology. He sits on the UK Climate Change Committee and chairs its Adaptation Sub-Committee.