Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators

Abstract

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.

Indicators in Social Life Cycle Assessment: A Review of Frameworks, Theories, and Empirical Experience

“…), food manufacturing (Springer et al. ), and other multiple sectors (Brandenburg et al. ; Brandenburg and Rebs ; Tajbakhsh and Hassini ).…”

“…Finally, seven sector-related literature reviews present sustainability assessment approaches and models that apply sustainability indicators to heavy and civil engineering construction (Bueno et al 2015), animal production and aquaculture (Samuel-Fitwi et al 2012), food manufacturing (Springer et al 2015), and other multiple sectors (Brandenburg et al 2014;Brandenburg and Rebs 2015;Tajbakhsh and Hassini 2015b). However, only Macombe and colleagues' (2013) review has a dedicated social focus on SLCA and social indicators in chemical manufacturing (biofuel production), whereas the other sector-related reviews focus on the overarching sustainability performance in each sector.…”

A New Systematic Approach to Vulnerability Assessment of Innovation Capability of Construction Enterprises

“…Vulnerability research has a wide range of applications, including climate change prediction, natural disaster prevention, food security, and public health improvement [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Generally, innovation vulnerability relates to the risk or uncertainty of a company's innovation capability.…”

“…Therefore, eliminating risks or identifying weaknesses is perhaps a preferred method of overcoming vulnerability. Elimination should, however, not simply lead to the avoidance of uncertainty when studying innovation capability, because uncertainty can sense or trace new directions or paths of economic development and thereby represents an innovative strength [18,19]. This new cognitive reasoning requires firms to treat uncertainty as part of innovation capability and develop a strategy to overcome it, or manage uncertainty instead of eliminating it.…”

Measuring Progress in Sustainable Food Cities: An Indicators Toolbox for Action

“…In the case of Nasir et al, [50] they develop an index for measuring sustainability in food systems using three dimensions of food security: accessibility, availability and utilisation. By and large, all the exercises that aim to have a holistic perspective include social, health and wellbeing, economic, environmental and governance dimensions in their framework grouping them in different ways (see [48,51] for recent reviews). -Goal-oriented approaches, which define an overall goal, desired outcomes and indicators to measure progress.…”