Professor Tim Benton

Professor Tim G. Benton leads the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. He joined Chatham House in 2016 as a distinguished visiting fellow, at which time he was also dean of strategic research initiatives at the University of Leeds. From 2011–16 he was the ‘champion’ of the UK’s Global Food Security programme which was a multi-agency partnership of the UK’s public bodies (government departments, devolved governments and research councils) with an interest in the challenges around food.

As a leading expert on food security and food systems, he has worked with UK governments, the EU, G20 and a range of other governments around the world, as well as leading businesses and civil society organizations, and has conducted many foresight exercises on the future of food systems, how to increase their resilience to climate change, reduce their environmental footprints and increase public health through nutrition. He has been a global agenda steward of the World Economic Forum and was an author of the IPCC’s Special Report on Food, Land and Climate (2019), and the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment (2017, 2022).