SECURE: Development of sustainable and resilient food systems in Qatar

This project establishes an integrated intelligence framework to secure Qatar’s food future within its hyper-arid climate by bridging the gap between farm-level operations and national-level strategy. It begins by developing the Farm Performance Framework, a multi-dimensional benchmarking tool that evaluates sustainability and resource-use efficiency to provide a holistic measure of national agricultural health. This intelligence is operationalized through a Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) Optimization System, which leverages Model Predictive Control (MPC) and real-time telemetry to govern water, energy, and nutrient fluxes, ensuring capacity efficiency and yield stability for centralized, large-scale production hubs. Complementing this, a Food Supply Chain Resilience framework employs Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate interactions between domestic production and global trade, enabling policymakers to stress-test the national supply chain against geopolitical and climate-related disruptions. To address the need for decentralized, distributed resilience, the project expands the nexus into urban and community spaces by integrating Plant Factory Design and Operation. These units feature AI-enabled automated health monitoring and disease detection to ensure high-density, socially inclusive food production that reduces the distance between the point of growth and the point of consumption. Together, these work packages form a cohesive digital ecosystem that drastically reduces Qatar’s agricultural water footprint while ensuring a resilient, technology-backed food supply aligned with national security priorities

Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU)