Stephanie Walton

Stranded assets in the food systems transition: risk and implications for the cattle and beef sectors in the USA

Stephanie Walton is a doctoral student with the Sustainable Finance Group at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. She is researching the risks and implications of asset stranding from a transition to sustainable and healthy diets with a specific focus on the cattle and beef sectors in the USA. She is a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of food systems, policy and political economy, finance and environmental economics. She is working on building and integrating spatial asset-level data into food systems, supply chain and network propagation models to assess the ripple effects of food system transformation across firms, financial institutions and investors. She is also working on a partnership with Barclay’s Bank on decarbonising their farm portfolio and supporting the agricultural transition.

Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Stephanie was a research associate at the Centre for Food Policy at City University of London. Her research focused on identifying the specific policies needed to drive forward the food systems transition. Her primary research, funded as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded SHEFS project, was on the interface between grassroots movements and government and policies to support the scaling up of grassroots socio-ecological innovation in grain farming in the UK. Other projects include contributing research to England’s National Food Strategy and for the EU Food Policy Coalition’s work on the EU Legislative framework for sustainable food systems. She has a MSc in Sustainable Cities from King’s College London where she focused on sustainable urban food flows.

Prior to moving into academia, Stephanie worked in advertising in London and New York working across several large food and FMCG firms including Diageo, Unilever and McCormick. She was awarded MediaWeek’s 30 Under 30 award in 2016.