In this short session we will talk about systematic approaches we are taking to consider and inform any policy related to food security, working in different disciplines and at different scales.   Any policy to address ‘food security’ needs to network together expert evidence coming from many different and disparate areas, which nevertheless interlock and interact. At the University of Warwick we are working with particular policy actors on specific case studies to understand under what conditions different kinds of evidence from all of these disparate areas can be coherently combined, as if by a single logical decision-maker, and how such a network can be used to compare the effects of different policies on each of the areas food security affects (health, education, social cohesion, etc.).  It is also important to understand when new evidence can be incorporated in a coherent way and how uncertainties in the evidence can be retained so as to give a measure of uncertainty in the solution. We will describe some of the case studies we have undertaken and discuss future research. Agenda16.00  Registration 16.10   Welcome and Introduction - Mr Geoff Moede Moderator 16.15   Professor Jim Smith (University of Warwick) will talk on building a decision support system for food security. We will discuss how decision support systems can help inform policy choices and provide narratives for the eventual decision.  These build on experiences of successful development of support systems for the nuclear industry. We outline various challenges for developing analogous designed to support policy design to ameliorate the impact of various food crises on food poverty within the UK. We then proceed to describe tentatively how these systems might be scaled up to help inform and try to address the analogous  challenges faced by European policymakers. 16.35   Dr Martin J. Barons (University of Warwick) will talk on her work with local government and provide an example of the impact on UK food poverty of a single foodstuff (sugar). We will describe recent developments associated with UK food policy decision support. We will describe some aspects of working with domain experts and demonstrate the types of processes used to elicit a structure which will be helpful to policymakers in drawing together information and forming a consensus.More info in links