We are a team of environmental scientists and software engineers at the University of Oxford, building the open data and tools needed to reduce the environmental impacts of the global food system.
There are currently no job openings at HESTIA, but you can email community@hestia.earth if you think you can help the Team.
There is an urgent need to reduce the environmental impacts of the global agricultural system while ensuring food for the 10 billion people expected to be 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 and production practices easily available to consumers, researchers, and policymakers.
Standardise how agri-environmental data are represented. This is one of the most pressing and unsolved challenges for unlocking global data exchange in agriculture.
Make high-quality data about the productivity and environmental sustainability of different agricultural practices and different food products readily and freely available.
Build scalable software and tools to 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.
Test whether our data and tools change behaviour through field trials with farmers worldwide, and collect new data to fill gaps in our database.
Our project aims to reduce the environmental impacts of the global agricultural system through science, data, and technology. Your abilities in these areas will directly contribute to helping solve environmental and food security challenges.
You will work with environmental scientists and software developers in a world-leading university, as part of a broader group working on food systems, environment, and conservation. Find out more about our team on the Oxford Martin School website.
We collaborate with different departments in the University, with agricultural research organisations, and with businesses in the food supply chain.
We are based at the Oxford Martin School in the centre of Oxford, but many of our team work remotely across Europe.
Our field work spans the globe, with active projects across Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America.
We are funded by many organisations, including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), who have supported our work since 2019, and the Login5 Foundation.
See all our fundersAll of our libraries for calculating environmental impacts are open source. Anyone can scrutinise the science, reproduce our results, and improve the models. There are no black boxes, and your work is never locked away.
All of our data are made freely and publicly available under the least restrictive CC-BY 4.0 licence, so farmers, researchers, and policymakers everywhere can use them, whether or not they can afford to pay.
The data and methods underpinning HESTIA were published in Science in 2018, and these data have been widely used by the media (e.g. the BBC, the New York Times, and the Guardian), in policy documents (e.g. the IPCC's 6th Assessment Report and the UK's National Food Strategy), by NGOs (e.g. WWF and the WRI), and by Our World in Data.
Our team's research has been published in Nature, PNAS, and the BMJ, amongst other journals.
We are really keen to hear from you if you are interested in joining our team. If you have questions or would like to get in touch proactively, please email us.
community@hestia.earth