West Midlands scientists are bending their minds around perhaps the biggest challenge facing humanity ever – how the heck are we going to feed ourselves in 2050?

With nine billion people on the planet depleting resources like never before, plus the havoc of climate change, it’s a humdinger of a problem.

Discussions on the matter are a tad of a stretch; mind-numbing stats and hand wringing all round often leave people feeling vaguely pessimistic about it all, yet without a clue about what to do.

The New Optimists Forum here in Birmingham is taking a different tack. The Forum’s scientists are considering these big issues, but grounded here, right here in this conurbation.

As part of a year-long planning project, the question they’re addressing is this: What will we be eating in Birmingham in 2050?

They’ve already identified three potential game-changers for us in Birmingham:

1. The possibility of the city having its own distributed heat and energy generation system by a carbon-negative process. This could thereby allow vertical farming, currently pie in the sky, to be a viable economic proposition.