Towards a modular and coherent approach to sustainability assessment of food value chains

Summary

Outline
1. Why do we need a coherent and a modular approach to
sustainability assessment?
2. What can we do about it?
Conclusions
• There is currently no common framework for sustainability assessment
-- Lack of comparability of results
-- All approaches have strengths and limitations => no one-size-fits all solution
• Full and high-quality sustainability assessment are too costly
-- Primary data collection time consuming and reason for poor data quality
-- Data requirements are often very similar (LCA, MCA, economic assessments, etc)
-- No common classification for data available
• Generic framework for sustainability assessments
-- Modularity to allow to focus on specific aspects of relevance
-- Coherence to allow to fit results into a bigger picture and reuse data
• Impacts of the framework
-- Increase data availability and quality
-- Reduce cost of sustainability assessments
-- Improve comparability