Agri-food certification schemes: how do they address greenhouse gas emissions?

Abstract

The number of private and voluntary agri-food standards, or certification schemes, has boomed in recent years. Their proliferation and prominence has been fuelled, in part, through wide-scale adoption by agri-food supply chain actors using them to display environmental credentials and to signify that products have been ‘sustainably sourced’. As both a source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and a sector with significant mitigation potential, agriculture has faced increasing pressures to demonstrate GHG emission reductions; it is therefore important to understand whether and how GHGs are addressed within certification schemes. This paper reviews a number of well-known and widely applied certification schemes in the agri-food arena, focussing on several of the certification schemes employed by Unilever and other multi-national companies as part of their commitment to reduce their GHG footprint and source their agricultural raw materials sustainably. A framework is constructed to enable comparison of schemes to elucidate the differences in the range of GHG drivers considered, the type of intervention in which they are addressed and how strictly the GHG relevant requirements are imposed. This should be useful for companies who are embarking on GHG reduction activities and are using agri-food certification schemes as a mechanism to do so.