TY - JOUR
T1 - Sustainable sourcing of global agricultural raw materials
T2 - Assessing gaps in key impact and vulnerability issues and indicators
AU - Springer, Nathaniel P.
AU - Garbach, Kelly
AU - Guillozet, Kathleen
AU - Haden, Van R.
AU - Hedao, Prashant
AU - Hollander, Allan D.
AU - Huber, Patrick R.
AU - Ingersoll, Christina
AU - Langner, Megan
AU - Lipari, Genevieve
AU - Mohammadi, Yaser
AU - Musker, Ruthie
AU - Piatto, Marina
AU - Riggle, Courtney
AU - Schweisguth, Melissa
AU - Sin, Emily
AU - Snider, Sara
AU - Vidic, Nataša
AU - White, Aubrey
AU - Brodt, Sonja
AU - Quinn, James F.
AU - Tomich, Thomas P.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Springer et al.
PY - 2015/6/11
Y1 - 2015/6/11
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0128752
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0128752
M3 - Article
C2 - 26065899
AN - SCOPUS:84936797103
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 10
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 6
M1 - e0128752
ER -