Danny Hunter

Danny has more than 25 years’ experience in over 30 countries - including 12 years living and working in Asia and the Pacific - leading and managing multidisciplinary teams working on environment and food, diets, and nutrition. He has been team leader of multiple global projects funded by the European Union, ACIAR, AusAid, NZAID, Global Environment Facility and others. As a researcher and practitioner, he is passionate about improving the provision of local, nutritious foods in school meals and strengthening school food environments to deliver healthier diets and inclusive farmer- and community-led development and biodiversity management. He is particularly interested in the role of integrated school nutrition approaches based on biodiversity-rich school gardens, linking local agroecological food production to school meals and school-based food systems education. In 2011, he was awarded the Alumni Award for Outstanding International Achievement by the University of Sydney, Faculty of Agriculture. Danny is currently Principal Scientist with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and was the Global Project Coordinator of the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition (BFN) project, recently named one of the CGIAR’s top innovations of the last 50 years. Before joining Bioversity in 2007 he worked for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and the University of the South Pacific (USP). He was a lead author of the WHO/CBD Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health, a State of Knowledge Review report in 2016. More recently he is a lead author of the White Paper, School Meals and Food Systems: Rethinking the Consequences for Climate, Environment, Biodiversity, and Food Sovereignty (2023). Danny has a PhD in Agriculture from the University of Sydney. He is a prolific writer and communicator and has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, chapters, books and policy documents. He has been the Series Editor of the Alliance and Routledge book series, Issues for Agricultural Biodiversity, for the past 15 years.

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