Environment professor awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize
Estimated reading time: 2:40
The Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prizes are awarded to two persons – one in the arts and the other in the social sciences and humanities, who have distinguished themselves by their outstanding achievements. This year, Dr. Jennifer Clapp was recognized for her ongoing contributions to Canada’s cultural and intellectual heritage related to global food security and sustainability.
“Working on issues like global hunger and environmental change can be hard because the challenges are so big and complex,” she says. “What gets me up in the morning ready to work on these difficult problems every day is a belief that information and ideas matter. If I can do just a small bit to help improve understanding of what drives troubling outcomes in the world, then it’s worth the effort if it can lead to policy improvements to address those problems.”
Dr. Clapp is a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo. She is recognized as a leading scholar on the relationship between food security, environmental sustainability, and global economic dynamics. Her impactful work focuses on the ways in which the extreme concentration of corporate and financial power in the global economy contributes to problems of hunger and environmental degradation, especially for the world’s poorest and most marginalized populations. Dr. Clapp’s research also identifies ways in which international policy reforms can address economic power imbalances to better support world food security and environmental sustainability. She has published widely on these themes, including her recent books Titans of Industrial Agriculture (MIT Press, 2025), Food, 3rd edition (Polity, 2020), and Hunger in the Balance (Cornell University Press, 2012).
In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Clapp has engaged extensively in the international policy context. She is currently a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub. From 2019-2023, she served as a member of the Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition that provides scientifically-based policy advice to the United Nations Committee on World Food Security, and she served as Vice-Chair of that body from 2021-2023.
Dr. Clapp has received numerous awards and honours, including election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2016) and as an International Fellow of the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (2023). She received the Innis Gérin Medal of the Royal Society of Canada (2018) for a distinguished and sustained contribution to the literature of the social sciences. She also received a Trudeau Fellowship (2013), the Canadian Association for Food Studies Award for Excellence in Research (2012), the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association (2018), and a prestigious Killam Research Fellowship (2020).
Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prizes are administered by the Canada Council in collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The winners are chosen by a peer assessment committee.
Congratulations to Dr. Clapp and her fellow award winner, multidisciplinary artist Mélanie Demers.
