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Understanding how to source agricultural raw materials sustainably is challenging in today’s globalized food system given the variety of issues to be considered and the multitude of suggested indicators for representing these issues. Furthermore, stakeholders in the global food system both impact these issues and are themselves vulnerable to these issues, an important duality that is often implied but not explicitly described. The attention given to these issues and conceptual frameworks varies greatly—depending largely on the stakeholder perspective—as does the set of indicators developed to measure them. To better structure these complex relationships and assess any gaps, we collate a comprehensive list of sustainability issues and a database of sustainability indicators to represent them. To assure a breadth of inclusion, the issues are pulled from the following three perspectives: major global sustainability assessments, sustainability communications from global food companies, and conceptual frameworks of sustainable livelihoods from academic publications. These terms are integrated across perspectives using a common vocabulary, classified by their relevance to impacts and vulnerabilities, and categorized into groups by economic, environmental, physical, human, social, and political characteristics. These issues are then associated with over 2,000 sustainability indicators gathered from existing sources. A gap analysis is then performed to determine if particular issues and issue groups are over or underrepresented. This process results in 44 “integrated” issues—24 impact issues and 36 vulnerability issues —that are composed of 318 “component” issues. The gap analysis shows that although every integrated issue is mentioned at least 40% of the time across perspectives, no issue is mentioned more than 70% of the time. A few issues infrequently mentioned across perspectives also have relatively few indicators available to fully represent them. Issues in the impact framework generally have fewer gaps than those in the vulnerability framework.

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As the sustainable university makes sustainability a central priority in its teaching and research, it is important to understand how universities are transitioning towards sustainability. Their pioneering of new practices, and their education of future generations, are giving sustainable universities a special ability to create and influence change. However, the effective implementation of sustainability policies in universities is highly dependent on the willingness and commitment of the management and students to engage in sustainable activities, and there is a lack of systematic effort in how best to map this interaction. To address this gap, this study mainly aimed to explain the sustainability process of universities by emphasizing the roles of students and the management system. A mixed method approach was used to achieve the goal. First, a qualitative content analysis of related research papers was performed through the PRISMA method to figure out the most important factors affecting the integration of sustainability into the university structure. The results of this section showed that six factors contribute to the effective implementation of sustainability in universities, which are: university culture, university leadership, sustainability education, sustainability knowledge, attitudes towards sustainability and commitment to sustainability. Then, structural equation modeling was used to ensure the validity of the model obtained from the qualitative section. The results indicated that both university leadership and culture positively influence the implementation of sustainability education in universities, which in turn has a positive effect on students’ knowledge and attitudes towards sustainability. The students’ sustainability knowledge and attitudes along with university leadership and culture showed a positive effect on their commitment to sustainability. Also, the students’ commitment to sustainability issues had the most direct effect on their participation in sustainability-oriented activities, and then their sustainability attitude and knowledge, respectively. Finally, sustainability knowledge, attitude and participation in sustainability-oriented activities were significantly related to the integration of sustainability into the university structure. Transitioning to sustainable universities will make society greener and healthier, setting an example for other organizations and the results of this study will help policy makers, managers and students to understand how to contribute to this transition.