Dr Pete Falloon
Dr Pete Falloon is the Met Office's Science Lead - Food Security
Areas of expertise
- Climate resilient food systems
- Soils (particularly carbon and nitrogen cycling)
- Ecosystems
- Agriculture (particularly greenhouse gas fluxes and land management)
- Water resources
Current activities
Dr Pete Falloon is the Met Office's Science Lead - Food Security, and leads the Met Office’s Climate Service for Defra on Food, Farming and Natural Environment, which provides scientific advice to Defra in support of climate resilience and adaptation in the agri-food system. The climate service feeds into the UK's Climate Change Risk Assessment and National Adaptation Programme, and Defra's UK Food Security Report.
Alongside climate resilient food systems, Pete's interests include soil (especially carbon), water, agriculture, land use and climate interactions.
Current projects include:
- Met Office’s Climate Service for Defra on Food, Farming and Natural Environment
- CSSP China Pathways Project (exploring climate-resilient development pathways using UK winter wheat as a case study)
- UKRI Agrifood4NetZero network+
Recent projects which Pete has been involved in include:
- The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project, led by PIK (2012-present)
- European Provision Of Regional Impacts Assessments on Seasonal and Decadal Timescales, led by the Met Office (2012-2017)
- NERC Hydrology-phosphorus interactions under changing climate and land-use: overcoming uncertainties and challenges for prediction to 2050 (NUTCAT-2050) project (Changing Water Cycles programme), led by the University of Lancaster (2013-2017).
- National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Environmental Change and Health (2014-2016)
- Nexus Network Think Piece "Systems thinking in environment-people science (STEPS)" (2014)
- IMPREX: IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes (2015-2019)
- Climate Science For Services Partnership Brazil (CSSP Brazil) (ongoing)
- Agricultural Model Intercomparison Project (AgMIP) - Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison (ongoing)
Career background
Dr Pete Falloon is the Met Office's Science Lead - Food Security, and leads the Met Office’s Climate Service for Defra on Food, Farming and Natural Environment. Pete has over 25 years of experience in modelling environmental systems, particularly the impacts of climate and land use change on agriculture, water, and soils. Pete has been at the Met Office Hadley Centre since 2004 and led the Climate Impacts Modelling team from 2009-2019, and was the Met Office Science Directorate’s Change Manager from 2020-2023. He is a contributing author to the UK’s Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) and a member of the Global Food Security Programme’s Programme Coordination Group board and supported the UK government in the IPCC Working Group 2 approval phase as part of the UK delegation.
He has a BSc (Hons) in Environmental Science of the Earth and Atmosphere from the University of Reading, and worked on modelling pesticide fate in riverine systems during an MSc (Research) and part-time lectureship the University of Greenwich. Pete moved to Rothamsted Research in 1996, where he worked on modelling soil, climate and vegetation interactions for 8 years and was awarded a PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2001.
He has written numerous peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on soil carbon dynamics, land use change and the impacts of climate change, and given many invited and offered presentations both in the UK and internationally, and worked for, and led science teams delivering to a wide range of government, industry and research customers.
Pete is also Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, and Sustainability Director at Food Drink Devon, which exists to promote quality, provenance and sustainability in Devon produce. Pete is also an honorary Associate at the Walker Institute.
External recognition
- Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Climate Studies editorial board: associate editor
- Joint Programming Initiative - Climate (JPI-Climate): governing board
- Global Food Security Programme - Programme Coordination Group board
- Has written, or contributed, to 93 scientific papers (24 first author), and 11 book chapters in environmental science.
For more information, see Pete Falloon's linked in profile, ResearchGate profile and Twitter.