Norway

The overarching goal of the SUSTAINHEALTH infrastructure is to enable better and more efficient research on food, health and sustainability issues through an e-infrastructure sharing data, methods and knowledge.

SUSTAINHEALTH will facilitate efficient access to relevant data and methods, thereby providing the tools needed to enable more cost-effective investments in Norwegian research and development on food, health and sustainability combined. SUSTAINHEALTH is coordinated by the University of Oslo, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Department of Nutrition. SUSTAINHEALTH is universal in design and may subsequently be implemented internationally. The SUSTAINHEALTH research infrastructure is a multi-level model combining e-infrastructure, database and methods coordination and knowledge integration.

A sustainability perspective has generally not been integrated into health research. A research infrastructure that enables this can also be used to generate and organize knowledge and facilitate trans-disciplinary approaches. It will also contribute to the creation and quality assurance of evidence that in turn is essential for agenda setting, decision-making, innovative research, network building, capacity building, education and future policy formulation.