Imagine being able to manufacture food anywhere in the world, or even in space, so everyone, everywhere, has enough nutritious food to eat! This dream can be achieved through Cellular Agriculture (Cell Ag). Cell Ag enables the production of food products that would normally come from an animal, such as meat and milk from cows, or from monocultures of crops such as oil palm trees, without having to keep increasing animal or plant numbers to feed our growing global population. Cell Ag, uses biological cell-level processes to create food via the 'building blocks of life' - the proteins, fats and carbohydrates. By delivering these building blocks, Cell Ag will transform food production by complementing traditional food production, so not only can we feed the world, but we can manufacture the food so that sustainability and social responsibility is embedded from the outset. Why would we wish to use Cell Ag rather than animals? Let's take the example of the building block, protein, from traditional meat. Life Cycle Assessments have shown that when comparing traditional meat manufacturing against the expected benefits of using Cell Ag, there is a predicted reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and land use, of up to 95%. The analysis also estimates that we could achieve up to 50% reduction in the use of water, compared to cattle farming. And we could reduce need for intensive farming so improving animal welfare too. So, with these benefits and the urgent need to achieve Net Zero Manufacturing and protect the planets resources. Why do we not have Cell Ag manufacturing in our homes or across all our food manufacturing sectors? There are several reasons - and our research will remove these blockers to Cell Ag manufacturing. Current status of Cell Ag Manufacturing research and outputs in the UK: In the UK (and across the World), there are pockets of excellent research being done, but little that focuses on delivering useable and scalable manufacturing machinery, processes, and systems in a coherent manner. The research tends to be in silos and focussed on aspects of the Manufacturing Value Chain. There are fundamental areas of research that need to be delivered to enable us to realise the Cell Ag potential, as well as transforming current research outputs to be useable. Through this Hub we will bring together the pockets of excellence in the UK, and deliver a coherent and targeted research programme that will ensure the UK Cell Ag research ecosystem is world-leading and has manufacturing impact. Rather than target a particular sector/type of food/product - the Hub will deliver manufacturing research which will enable production of food building blocks at local, regional and international levels. Our vision is to be the world leader in delivering materials, manufacturing processes and skills to escalate the world's adoption of sustainable Cell Ag food production. We will achieve this through becoming the net exporter of the building blocks of life.

Chemical technologies underpin almost every aspect of our lives, from the energy we use to the materials we rely on and the medications we take. The UK chemical industry generates £73.3 billion revenue and employs 161,000 highly skilled workers. It is highly diverse (therefore resilient) with SMEs and microbusinesses making up a remarkable 96% of the sector. Today's global chemicals industry is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and consumes 20% of oil and gas as carbon feedstock to make products. Decarbonisation (defossilisation) of the chemicals sector is, therefore, urgently required, but to do so presents major technical and societal challenges. New sustainable chemical technologies, enabled by new synthesis, catalysis, reaction engineering, digitalisation and sustainability assessment, are needed. In order to ensure that the UK develops a resource efficient, resilient and sustainable economy underpinned by chemical manufacturing, developments in chemical technologies must be closely informed by whole systems approaches to measure and minimise environmental footprints, understand supply chains and assess economic and technological viability, using techniques such as life cycle assessment and material flow analysis. Lack of access to experts in science and engineering with a holistic understanding of sustainable systems is widely and publicly recognised as a significant risk. It is therefore extremely timely to establish a new EPSRC CDT in Sustainable Chemical Technologies that fully integrates a whole systems approach to training and world leading research in an innovation-driven context. This CDT will train the next generation of leaders in sustainable chemical technologies with new skills to address the growing demand for highly skilled PhD graduates with the ability to develop and transfer sustainable practices into industry and society. The new CDT will be a unique and vibrant focus of innovative doctoral training in the UK by taking full advantage of two exciting new developments at Bath. First, the CDT will be embedded in our new Institute for Sustainability (IfS) which has evolved from the internationally leading Centre for Sustainable and Circular Technologies (CSCT) and which fully integrates whole systems research and sustainable chemical technologies - two world-leading research groupings at Bath - under one banner. Second, the CDT will operate in close partnership with our recently established Swindon-based Innovation Centre for Applied Sustainable Technologies (iCAST, www.iCAST.org.uk) a £17M partnership for the rapid translation of university research to provide a dynamic innovation-focused context for PhD training in the region. Our fresh and dynamic approach has been co-created with key industrial, research, training and civic partners who have indicated co-investment of over £17M of support. This unique partnership will ensure that a new generation of highly skilled, entrepreneurial, innovative PhD graduates is nurtured to be the leaders of tomorrow's green industrial revolution in the UK.

This research will critically assess the potential impact on UK agriculture of cultured meat, a technology with possibly profound and uncertain implications for the future of food and farming. Also known as 'clean', 'cell-based' and 'cultivated' meat, cultured meat is engineered animal tissue intended for people to eat. It is a type of alternative protein. Alternative proteins are strategically important to UK and global food systems because they can use less land and water than livestock products, lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, cut antibiotic use and the risk of new zoonotic diseases, and help promote animal welfare. Early data suggest that cultured meats could yield such benefits, but may struggle to compete with other meat alternatives on energy efficiency and cost. They are important because they could substitute more directly for livestock meat than other alternatives, and are at an earlier stage of development, so more open to influence by policy-makers and investors. While cultured meat is potentially transformative, its benefits therefore remain speculative. It also brings risks in nutrition, food fraud and food safety. Technical, regulatory, market and cultural uncertainties mean that the sector may not develop in the UK commercially, or may develop but fail to deliver public benefits. This project focuses on how cultured meat could affect farming in the UK. This is relevant to its environmental, economic and animal welfare impact, and to public and political attitudes that will shape how it gets regulated. Cultured meat is commonly assumed to be a threat to farmers, producing food in ways that could put some out of business. However, nobody has actually looked into this in-depth, or explored these issues with farmers in the UK. In practice, the different ways that cultured meat might develop could bring diverse risks and opportunities for farmers. The technology may create demands for new agricultural products, such as cells (donor herds for cell harvesting), feedstock for growth media (arable, forage, sugar beet), feedstock for edible scaffolds (cellulose, pea, bean, soya) and current waste streams (glucose, cellulose). In some scenarios, cultured meat might even be produced on farms, in facilities owned and operated by farmers, or could complement campaigns for 'less and better' meat. Alternatively, it may not reduce livestock meat consumption at all, or it may compete directly with high-welfare meat production. This research is designed to influence how this potentially transformative technology affects the UK food system. We will work with farmers and other people who may be affected by the technology to investigate whether they can see responsible ways of developing cultured meat. We will examine what farmers currently think of cultured meat, and explore different ways the technology could develop. We will work with farmers in a wide range of different situations to model how their businesses could get involved in or be affected by cultured meat production, and assess the environmental, social and economic consequences. We aim to answer the following questions: 1. How do UK farmers currently perceive cultured meat? 2. What threats and opportunities does the development of cultured meat pose to UK farm businesses in different scenarios? 3. Under what conditions, if any, would on-farm production of cultured meat be practical, economically viable and desirable in the UK? In answering these questions, we will consider not only the direct effects of cultured meat on farm businesses and livelihoods, but also wider ecological, nutritional, cultural and ethical implications, and how cultured meat might complement or conflict with the ways land use and diets in the UK could change to become sustainable.