Application Deadline: 22 April 2025 (Midnight GMT)

After the success of the inaugural edition, we are thrilled to launch the second round of the Food Action Awards. Organised by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA, a research initiative at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, the awards expand ongoing work reimagining foodways in drylands and wetlands amidst the climate crisis. The wider goal is to advance ecological networks to produce new knowledge and action towards spatial justice. Alongside the two key research projects of the initiative, Water Buffalo Commons and Monoculture Meltdown, the 2025 Food Action Awards will support practices that align with CLIMAVORE principles worldwide.

Reimagining Seasonalities

Extractive food practices have eroded bodies, ecologies, and climates, distorting seasons and nutrient flows. To speed up growth, growing periods are altered through artificial means—light, chemicals, exploited labour—that transform market and cultivation cycles, creating perpetual summers without winter, eliminating periods of darkness and rest. Globally, distinctions between spring, summer, autumn and winter, as well as dry and rainy seasons, are increasingly blurred, while intense human activity fuels soil exhaustion, water scarcities and wetland disappearance.

CLIMAVORE works to adapt foodscapes to these new human-made seasons, moving beyond a carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan diet into a way of eating according to drought, polluted seas, or flash floods. It proposes an adaptive form of eating, shifting to filter feeders in times of water pollution by fish farms or growing heat-resistant crops under heat and water stress. Recognising how interconnected metabolisms flow and feed on each other, CLIMAVORE expands the ecological perception of where one body stops and another one begins.

Call for Proposals

The 2025 Food Action Awards invite proposals that identify and analyse new seasons of the climate crisis and their manifestation in other geographies facing similar conditions along the broken food chain. Proposals should investigate local contexts, particular geographies, historical legacies, and potential futures, while proposing responses to shifts in food networks, and ultimately, how we eat as humans change the climate. This is an opportunity to contribute to the wider CLIMAVORE platform by connecting research, activist networks, grassroots initiatives, labour struggles and geographies in flux. Awardees will receive financial support to expand their existing work with communities on the ground, take time and cover risks to experiment, trial and research actions, prototypes, and discursive processes. In parallel, awardees will engage with the CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA team in thematic and methodological discussions.

Who Can Apply?

The awards are open to international practitioners, community-led projects, collectives, and researchers working across farming, architecture, cultivation, visual arts, food studies, environmental humanities, and related fields. Proposals may explore infrastructural prototypes, field trials, landworker solidarity networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies, microclimatic environments, and other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and nonhuman nourishing.

Award Categories

—Research Action Award: Open to those with at least five years of practice. This award of £25,000 includes all fees and production costs.

—Emerging Practice Award: Open to recent RCA graduates (within the last six years). This award of £15,000 includes all fees and production costs.

Applicants are encouraged to submit individual or collective proposals that:

• Clearly define a CLIMAVORE season and its causes (for instance, new periods of drought, soil depletion, wetland disappearance, subsidence, flash floods, etc).
• Propose methodologies for transforming local or global food systems.
• Articulate aims, objectives, and the socio-economic, nature-cultural and political contexts of the work.
• Engage soil and water systems and explore the connection between human and nonhuman bodies in meaningful ways.

Submission requirements

Send your application via this online submission form, including:

• Project Title
• Project Summary (max 200 words)
• Applicant(s) short bio (max 150 words)
• Project Proposal (max 750 words): Title, site(s), research process, connection to CLIMAVORE seasons, timeline, and methodology. Project Start Date must be 1 June 2025 with completion by 15 June 2026.
• Indicative budget for award usage (we understand that this may vary as the project evolve).
• 3 Project Images with captions and credits (max 2Mb).
• Portfolio (max 10 images or videos with relevant URL links)
• CV (1-page summary with your everyday or greatest achievements)
• 1-minute video introducing yourself/yourselves. Feel free to include other interlocutors and multispecies companions.
• Additional visual materials (optional): PDF file (up to 10 pages and max 5Mb). Name the file as APPLICANTNAME_PROJECTNAME.pdf

Application Guidelines

We encourage applicants of all ages, genders, backgrounds, and places of residence to apply.

• Institutional or academic affiliation is not required.
• Confirmed collaboration with local partners or organisations on the ground is essential.
• All materials should be submitted via the online submission form.
• Applications and supplementary materials must be in English, but the project can take place in non-anglophone regions.

We understand that English proficiency varies and that it may not be the applicants’ first language. Proposals will be considered solely based on the criteria specified above, regardless of language skills. We accept applications translated using software, in which case both original language and English versions should be submitted.

Selection process & Timeline

• Open Call launch: 10 March 2025
• Application Deadline: 22 April 2025 (Midnight GMT)
• Online Interviews: 9 May 2025

The members of the jury will have access to all the applications and applications will be evaluated on:

• Engagement with CLIMAVORE themes.
• Site-specificity and research depth.
• Long-term commitment to food system transformation.
• Methodological originality and interdisciplinarity.

Awardees will attend two group meetings (in person or online) aligned with their project timeline.

If you have any further questions, you can contact awards@rca.ac.uk

2024 Food Action Award Winners

After receiving almost 100 applications in its inaugural edition, it was worth highlighting how the different projects identified new seasons of the climate crisis and their manifestation in other geographies facing similar conditions along the broken food chain. Proposals included research into legacies of extractivism and possible reparative futures to address how we eat as humans change the climate. Congratulations to the following recipients:

Yara Dowani, Om Sleiman Farm, (Research Action Award - £25,000) for her project Regeneration Towards Liberation, which tackles a season of drought by testing syntropic farming as a regenerative method for food production in Palestine. The award will enable Om Sleiman Farm to expand its work with women and food collectives on the ground that can reach similar geographies facing the challenges of water exploitation, settler colonialism and drought across the Mediterranean and beyond.

Mingxin Li (Emerging Practice Award - £15,000) for recent RCA graduates for the project Golden Butter, Golden Motherland, which looks into ways to address the disappearance of the yak herding wetlands in Tibet. The project aims to reactivate ancestral food and pastoralist knowledge between generations, to form new networks that can support ongoing environmental crises.

The jury also gave the following six Honourable Mentions to commend the work of:

Dharmendra Prasad & Pujita Guha (Harvest School & Hosting Lands)
Alys Fowler
Tizintizwa Collective
Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Lab
Qanat
Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun

The 2024 Food Action Award jury was chaired by Danielle Burrows (CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA) and consisted of: Cooking Sections, Cléa Daridan (Head of Arts and Culture, Community Jameel), Christine Eyene (eye.on.art), Rahul Gudipudi (Senior Curator, CARA), Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture, RCA), Abby Rose (Farmerama Radio), and Paulo Tavares (autônoma / FAU, Universidade de Brasília).