What Happened This Month | August 2026
Published: 5 September 2026
August brought SCAF’s third annual event to Aberdeen, alongside a new data-focused activity and further opportunities for members to connect, present their work and shape the Alliance’s next phase.
Annual Events have been a highlight of the SCAF diary for the last 3 years – this year, the annual event travelled to the North of Scotland, and ran from 25–27 August at ONE BioHub in Aberdeen, with an Early Career Network satellite event, a full conference day and the unconference. The theme, “Catalysing collaboration for a better food future”, reflected our ambition to bring together the different disciplines, sectors and perspectives needed to work on complex food-system questions.
Catching up with colleagues and friends in person is always rewarding, and we enjoyed many food-themed conversations with the 71 attendees who joined us across the three days. Mixing formal presentations with seed conversations and workshop sessions meant we collected a lot of input and ideas – around collaboration, becoming an even more welcoming alliance, and SCAF 2.0 - and we will synthesise the outputs from these sessions in the coming weeks. Special thanks to our session chairs (David Blane, Stephen Euston, David McBey, Ana Tominc, Ellen Williamson), keynote speakers (Dennis Overton and Gillian Purdon) and all contributors at the conference and the unconference. Congratulations to our prize winners:
- Best Oral Presentation by an ECR: Hattie Bracey, "Methane mitigating dairy cow diets and UK nutrient intakes: NDNS modelling of seaweed and linseed supplementation"
- Best Poster Presentation by an ECR: Abigail Stephen, "Co-creating and testing Cook Healthy, Eat Well (CHEW): a healthy eating intervention for adults experiencing food insecurity"
- Best Collaborative Project: Ellen Williamson & Maryam Ishaq, "Community Food Co-Created Markets Pilot Study: An Intervention to Improve Access to Affordable and Nutritious Foods in Socio-Economically Deprived Areas of Glasgow"
Throughout the annual event, we talked about data, what to measure, and how to share it – echoing key points covered during a couple of events earlier this month:
On 14 August, SCAF hosted Beyond the Doughnut, a webinar with Cris Hasan, chaired by John Crawford. The session introduced a new modelling approach for exploring the links between sustainable food systems and social and economic inequalities, using Scotland as a case study. It examined trade-offs among soil health, food production, carbon emissions, and social outcomes, and demonstrated an interactive dashboard for comparing scenarios. The recording is available here.
The SCAF Data Event: Food Security in Scotland – Making Data Visible and Accessible brought together the Mapping the Food System (Rachel Norman) and Food Security (Ada Garcia) themes around a practical question: what food-security data already exists, and how can people find and use it? The session introduced the SCAF Data Aggregator as a way to make existing datasets more visible, reduce duplication and strengthen links between research, practice and the Good Food Nation Act. This is a useful next step for the Aggregator. Its value will depend not only on the platform itself but also on whether members contribute datasets and provide enough information for others to understand what is available. The event, therefore, focused on access and discoverability: helping people identify relevant data, see where gaps remain, and build a more connected picture of food security in Scotland.
Looking back on August, SCAF’s challenge now is to build on these activities and distil key ideas to identify which connections lead to collaborations, which resources members use, and where the Alliance can make its most distinctive contribution.
First published: 5 September 2026