Abstract
With sustainability within food systems becoming an increasingly important issue, several approaches that claim to assess the sustainability of farms, farming systems, and supply chains have been developed. Looking more closely at these sustainability impact assessment approaches, we discerned considerable differences between them in terms of scope, the level of assessment, and the precision of indicators used for impact assessment. Our aim was to classify and analyze a range of available sustainability impact assessment approaches with respect to scope and precision. From a total of 35 sustainability assessment approaches, we selected 6 for a detailed comparison. From our analysis, we concluded that there are 3 different types of trade-offs in these approaches: between different kinds of scope, between different indicators for precision and trade-offs, and between the scope and precision. Thus, one-size-fits-all solutions, with respect to tool selection, are rarely feasible. Furthermore, as indicator selection determines the assessment results, different and inconsistent indicators can lead to contradictory assessment results that may not be comparable. To overcome these shortcomings, sustainability impact assessments should include a precise definition of the notion of “sustainability” along with a description of the methodological approach and the indicator sets and should aim for harmonization of indicators and assumptions. Global initiatives such as the Sustainability Assessment in Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) Guidelines are a helpful step toward shedding light on the differences of these approaches and making the assessment results more comparable.
Highlights
Food production, in particular its agricultural stages, has substantial impacts on climate change and biodiversity and on different environmental resources, such as water, soil, and air (Steinfeld 2006, Rockström et al 2009, Foley et al 2011)
With sustainability within food systems becoming an increasingly important issue, several approaches that claim to assess the sustainability of farms, farming systems, and supply chains have been developed
DEVELOPMENT We conducted the comparison of different sustainability assessment approaches in six steps
Summary
In particular its agricultural stages, has substantial impacts on climate change and biodiversity and on different environmental resources, such as water, soil, and air (Steinfeld 2006, Rockström et al 2009, Foley et al 2011). Sustainable development (WCED 1987) has become one of the most frequently used frameworks for analyzing the agricultural and food sector in a comprehensive and holistic way. During the past 15 years, a variety of different approaches have been developed for assessing aspects of sustainability in the food sector and especially for agricultural production (Grimm 2009, Singh et al 2009, Binder et al 2010). Approaches for holistic farm assessment, such as Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE; Grenz et al 2009), comprehensively address sustainability but can only be applied to agricultural enterprises. Environmental management, i.e., International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001, Eco-Management and Audit Scheme, and sustainability reporting systems (GRI 2011) establish procedures for dealing with sustainability at the company level but do not allow for crosscompany comparisons and lack a clearly defined science-based assessment methodology
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