Professor Tim Benton is the ‘Champion’ for the UK’s Global Food Security (GFS) programme, leading, facilitating and coordinating its activities. GFS is a partnership of the UK’s main public funders of research in food security, including the research councils and government departments (including environment, farming and rural affairs, international development, health and business, innovation and skills). The role of GFS is to identify the challenges to food security, through a systems approach, and to ensure that strategically important research in this area is undertaken, often requiring an inter-disciplinary and inter-sectoral approach. 

In addition, an important role is to help the alignment and engagement of different communities of stakeholders. He is also a leading researcher, based at the University of Leeds, on agri-environment interactions and finding ways to make agricultural production more sustainable.