Abstract
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have shone a spotlight on the importance of adaption to climate change. However, progress in achieving SDG 12 which calls for, “responsible consumption and production” has been stalled by the unavailability of indicators that adequately capture and motivate increased responsible consumption. To fill this gap, this article presents an alternative indicator that makes use of cultivar characteristics and uses South African fresh peach and nectarine exports as a focus area. Principal component analysis is used to extract and summarize the product value propositions identified in composite indices that were constructed by weighting the proportional use of cultivars in exports between 1956 and 2017. The indices acquired from the analysis were found to measure the provisions for sustainable consumption, good-quality fruit and off-peak fruit supply. The study’s results show that progress was found in the provisions for sustainable consumption and this was mainly driven by improvements in cultivars’ climate change adaptability. However, the last two decades have been characterized by years of successive lower readings on this index. Improvements in fruit quality index were found to be attained at the expense of farm enterprise productivity. The study concludes that strategies be developed to encourage the use of cultivars that promote responsible consumption as, if left uninfluenced, market forces will spur unsustainable production.
Highlights
Climate change is regarded by many as a defining challenge of our times [1], and it is not surprising that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has two Goals (SDG 13 and SDG 12) that are concerned with the mitigation of, and adaption to, this environmental phenomenon
The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach was used to reduce the number of indicators to comprehensive product value indices or Principal Components (PCs)
PCA is a suitable method for this analysis because it is an unbiased method that ensures that the attribution of each indicator in the composite index is based on the statistical behaviour of the underlying data, and not by preconceived notions of their influence [2]
Summary
Climate change is regarded by many as a defining challenge of our times [1], and it is not surprising that the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has two Goals (SDG 13 and SDG 12) that are concerned with the mitigation of, and adaption to, this environmental phenomenon. The amalgamation of sustainable consumption and sustainable production in this SDG has been hailed as an improvement in global development goal setting, as previous development agendas had failed to fully integrate these two aspects [3]. Such a merger of ideologies allows the development of approaches that bring together technical environmental indicators with consumer values. Past efforts to encourage sustainable consumption have been designed around the concept of positive and negative incentives and using them to direct consumer behaviour Examples of these have included the introduction of environmental taxes and eco-labels. Changes in the values of such indices are limited in their ability to motivate for increases in sustainable consumption as the underlying data is not directly linked to consumer behaviour but associated with the actions of public administrative authorities
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