Abstract
A sustainable future for the community is one of the objectives established by the European Union Agenda 2030. Furthermore, sustainable consumption has been identified as one of the possible trajectories for sustainable development. It is for this reason that food production, distribution and consumption ways cannot be overlooked for sustainability achievement, as well as the consumer’s related perception. In this research the Best–Worst scaling methodology was adopted to explore the priorities declared by a sample of 801 consumers among 12 different sustainability definitions selected from the scientific literature. The choice experiment was carried out through face-to-face interviews during two food and wine events closely related to the sustainability theme in the food sector. The respondents considered as sustainability priority definition the “preservation of natural resources”, followed by “decent working conditions” and “accessibility for everyone to healthy and safe food”. Moreover, 5 consumer’s clusters were identified according to the priorities assigned to the different sustainability definitions, as well as to individuals socio-demographic characteristics. The description of the priorities assigned by the clusters to the different sustainability definitions have also been described as guidelines for consumer attitudes towards the different sustainability dimensions (environmental, social, economic and governance).
Highlights
Europe has recently adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), promoted by United Nations, and is committed to being the forerunner in implementing them by 2030 [1]
Sustainable consumption has been listed as one of the possible directions for sustainable development; for this reason, this paper aimed to examine the conceptual bases that allow its practice by exploring the importance that a group of selected consumers gives to different definitions of sustainability, selected from the scientific literature of the past 20 years
One of the advantages of this approach is that it was able to scale the importance of sustainability definitions, analyzing the dimensions determined in accordance to individuals declarations about the real priorities
Summary
Europe has recently adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), promoted by United Nations, and is committed to being the forerunner in implementing them by 2030 [1]. The SDGs represent a program for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all without leaving anyone behind (www.un.org) In this extensive program, food appears to be evident as a transversal issue that connects most of the objectives; the 2030 agenda cannot be effectively implemented without eliminating hunger, achieving food and nutrition security and improving the health of the world’s population. It is evident that the ways in which food is produced, distributed and consumed influence the approach toward sustainability This requires a sensible change of the mentality regarding the whole food system, mostly in order to improve the basic knowledge related to it, as well as to identify opportunities to design meaningful actions to support the transition [2]. The awareness that the choices, behaviors and lifestyles of consumers, or their consumption decisions, play a key role in achieving sustainable development is one of the greatest agreements to emerged in the last decade [3,4,5]
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