Societal Challenges are the big aspects associated with food systems. In SUSFANS 4 such challenges are defined, on which the food systems are measured. To address these societal challenges, policy makers define policy visions to agree upon a general direction for progress concerning each challenge.
For SUSFANS challenge areas, it would be ensuring balanced and sufficient food for EU citizens; reducing environmental impacts of the food system; improving the competitiveness EU agri-food businesses; and promoting a more equitable distribution of costs and benefits emerging from food systems. A policy vision is often accompanied by a policy goal, i.e. a certain target that needs to be reached.
To assess the status of the food system in respect to a certain policy goal, SUSFANS has come up with indicators that aim to measure the status of this policy goal. This is done by building up performance metrics; the four components that make up this policy goal.
The following section describes policy goal Reduced Environmental Impacts of EU food system that was embedded in Deliverable 6.3.
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Planet: Reduced environmental impacts of the EU food system
Our society is facing multiple environmental threats – deteriorating quality of the air, the water, the soil, changing climate, reducing the genetic diversity and material resources (EEA 2015). The 7th Environment Action Programme (EAP) of the European Union sets out the vision that “in 2050, we live well, within the plant’s ecological limits” setting three key objectives5: (i) protect, conserve, and enhance the Union’s natural capital, (ii) turn the Union into a resource-efficient, green and competitive low-carbon economy, and (iii) safeguard the Union’s citizens from environment-related pressures and risk to health and wellbeing (EU 2013a). Global climate change is one of the largest environmental challenges humanity is facing and considerable efforts are required to limit global warming well below 2.0 or even at 1.5 degree Celsius, as indicated in the Paris Agreement in 2016 (Rogelj et al. 2016). According to Steffen et al. (2015b), biogeochemical flows of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), as well as genetic diversity, are in the ‘zone’ of high risk, exceeding the planetary boundaries at global and regional level.
For the SUSFANS project we therefore define four areas of concern, with the aim to achieve:
- Climate stabilization
- Clean air, soil and water
- Biodiversity conservation
- Preservation of natural resources
A recent assessment of the impact of agriculture on five main threats (climate, air, soil and water quality, and biodiversity) concluded that agriculture is a significant contributor for most of the environmental threats assessed and is dominating one for some of them (see Table 6, next page). E.g. agriculture is responsible for 55% of air pollutant emissions, 59% of the N burden of the water systems, and 51% of loss of biodiversity in Europe (Leip et al. 2015b). Seafood production causes considerable pressures on marine ecosystems, of various degree and form in different areas and from different production systems (e.g. Emeis et al. 2015; Halpern et al. 2015).
All environmental aggregate indicators should consider the impact from a life cycle perspective of the supply chains for a food product. This comprises emissions from agricultural activities (both the cropping and animal sector for livestock products), but also emissions from agricultural inputs (related to energy and land use, fertilizers, chemical substances etc.) and emissions from post-farm gate processes (processing, transport, consumption). In the following sections, we describe the SUSFANS approach as applied to environmental impact measures of agri-food industries. The approach is used to quantify each of the performance metrics on the basis of suggested aggregate indicators (section 3) and their importance for the performance metrics (weighting factor) as well as a possible vision for the indicators that can be used to benchmark progress towards reaching the desired goals.