| 1. |
- Afrane, George, et al.
(författare)
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A product chain organisation study of certified cocoa supply
- 2013
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Ingår i: 6th International Conference on Life Cycle Management, LCM2013, 25-28 August 2013,Göteborg.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cocoa supplies may become limited in the future. Demands for sustainable cocoa sparked an exploration of the product chain organisation of conventional and certified cocoa from Ghana. The comparison shows that transparency requirements have led to a more complex product chain. Even so, certification has yielded important productivity increases resulting in environmental benefits (e.g. reduced greenhouse gas emissions) and improved livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
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| 2. |
- Clift, Roland, et al.
(författare)
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The Challenges of Applying Planetary Boundaries as a Basis for Strategic Decision-Making in Companies with Global Supply Chains
- 2017
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Ingår i: Sustainability. - : MDPI AG. - 2071-1050. ; 9:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework represents a significant advance in specifying the ecological constraints on human development. However, to enable decision-makers in business and public policy to respect these constraints in strategic planning, the PB framework needs to be developed to generate practical tools. With this objective in mind, we analyse the recent literature and highlight three major scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the PB approach in decision-making: first, identification of thresholds or boundaries with associated metrics for different geographical scales; second, the need to frame approaches to allocate fair shares in the 'safe operating space' bounded by the PBs across the value chain and; third, the need for international bodies to co-ordinate the implementation of the measures needed to respect the Planetary Boundaries. For the first two of these challenges, we consider how they might be addressed for four PBs: climate change, freshwater use, biosphere integrity and chemical pollution and other novel entities. Four key opportunities are identified: (1) development of a common system of metrics that can be applied consistently at and across different scales; (2) setting 'distance from boundary' measures that can be applied at different scales; (3) development of global, preferably open-source, databases and models; and (4) advancing understanding of the interactions between the different PBs. Addressing the scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the planetary boundaries needs be complemented with progress in addressing the equity and ethical issues in allocating the safe operating space between companies and sectors.
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| 3. |
- Keller, Emma, et al.
(författare)
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Quantifying and managing GHG emissions in global agri-food supply chains: A case study on cocoa farming in Ghana.
- 2013
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Ingår i: 7th International Society for Industrial Ecology conference.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agriculture contributes approximately a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Increasingly, food manufacturers and retailers are looking to use their controlling position in the agri-food supply chain to promote sustainability through improved farm management practices. One important mechanism to achieve this is through promoting consumer products certified by schemes, such as Rainforest Alliance or Fair-trade, among others. These schemes provide an assurance that certain general management standards are being met. However, these forms of certification rarely cover specific impacts such as contribution to climate change. Understanding the GHG impact of different farm management practices requires reliable and quantitative tools based on information which farmers can readily supply and providing results in a readily intelligible form. Such a tool should ideally be universally applicable, not just to food production in the developed world.This contribution describes an application of the ‘Cool Farm Tool’ developed at the University of Aberdeen for a consortium of food manufacturers (Hillier et al., 2011) for quantifying farm-level GHG emissions, to test its applicability on the developing world, specifically on cocoa farms in Ghana with different experiences of ‘sustainability’ and certification. The results suggest that environmentally certified farms have a lower GHG emission profile than non-certified farms and also provide some indication into the key practices driving the difference, particularly land-use change and provision of shade trees which sequester carbon. Furthermore, the case study highlights the challenges of using the tool with smallholders and the complexities of modelling the cocoa production system. The key insights are used to provide recommendations for improving the tool, the replicability of the approach at scale in a global food chain and the possible implications for certification design.
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