Climate change and disaster impact reduction

Based on papers presented at the 'UK - South Asia Young Scientists and Practitioners Seminar on Climate Change and Disaster Impact Reduction' held at Kathmandu, Nepal on 5-6 June, 2008

The use and usefulness of PAS 2050 carbon footprinting and labelling in the UK food supply chain

Accelerated climate change due to enhanced global warming, challenges sustainability efforts including those in the food industry. Since the introduction of the World’s first voluntary carbon footprinting standard in 2008, known as PAS 2050, there are significant gaps in the understanding of its uptake. This thesis examines the role of carbon footprint labelling of food products in helping to deal with the environmental problem of climate change. The research looks to the limitation of life cycle analysis/assessment, together with the imprecision of the assumed scientific base for action in the context of the food supply chain. It draws upon a series of theoretical lenses, particularly nudge economics, that underlie behavioural change in market economies as well as the parallel contexts of public health. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is that it demonstrates no single lens can fully capture the complexity of behavioural change for the environment. A case study approach was adopted to elucidate the drivers and barriers for uptake and use at the supply and demand elements of the UK food chain. Interrogation of the supply side was undertaken via detailed qualitative interviews, held at three key stages of the supply chain covering production, distribution and retail. While there was some evidence that those closer to production had higher environmental values, the power of the retail sector, particularly through pricing and quality control, dictated conditions of production. Such power worked against environmental considerations in the food industry. On the demand side, a consumer questionnaire survey of 428 respondents with some openended interrogation indicates that while consumers show willing to change consumption patterns to address environmental issues, they are confused by the current range of information that is available. Price and quality remain the dominant factors rather than broader environmental and social concerns. The results of this thesis suggest that the drive for carbon footprint labelling is towards omnilabelling, although voluntary measures do not provide a guarantee of good environmental performance. Consumers think about environmental issues but not a willingness to pay because environmental concerns are not embedded in the social psyche. The complexity of carbon equivalents cannot be captured in a single label, not least because of multiple processes and producers in the supply chain as voluntary carbon footprint standards and labels will not necessarily shape business motivations for ecological responsiveness

Environmental impacts of food retail: A framework method and case application

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. The food retail sector is the gatekeeper between consumers and producers and has substantial influence on consumption and production choices via procurement and provision decisions. Food provision and consumption systems embody huge environmental impacts worldwide. Food retailers as gatekeepers have a key role to play to enable sustainable consumption and provision to become common practice. In this paper, a framework to attribute emissions and water use to individual and all food retail businesses and their products by geographical area and postcode of cities is presented. As far as the current authors are aware, such a framework has not been generated for food retail sector businesses before, primarily due to barriers to input-output modelling of the sector. The scientific value added is that a novel approach to overcome barriers is presented as well as the required framework. The framework is illustrated for Southampton, but can be applied in other regions of the world where similar data exist. The value of a business's product emissions estimates (generated by the framework) is they can be a first step in informing product prioritisation for focussing information searches or more detailed life cycle analysis to make sustainable procurement and choice editing decisions. The approach has value to government, businesses and non-government organisations (NGOs) in developing strategy and planning sustainable provision and procurement; by helping benchmark sustainable shopping provision, prioritisation of retail businesses and product categories for sustainable procurement/choice editing

Young consumers’ preferences for water-saving wines: an experimental study

Freshwater scarcity is becoming one of the most pressing issues of the global environmental sustainability, and agriculture is the main responsible of that scarcity. During the last decade, there has been an increasing consumers’ environmental concern about the impact of food production on water usage. This paper investigates young consumers’ preferences towards water saving wines and the determinants of willingness to pay (WTP) for these products. Data were collected through an experimental auction mechanism in Italy by assessing young consumers’ willingness to pay for three different wines (i.e. conventional-no water saving label, water saving front-of-pack labelled and water saving back-of-pack labelled). Young consumers’ (N=200) characteristics related to their personal values, pro-environmental attitudes, wine habits, labeling attitudes and socio-demographics were also collected. Results reveal that on average young consumers are willing to pay higher prices for water saving labeled wines. Additionally, wine consumption frequency, label trust and use as well as consumers’ environmental-friendly attitude have a positive effect on willingness to pay for these wines. The current study offers valuable insights to policy makers and wine producers for product differentiation and for more efficiently targeting campaigns towards young consumers, in order to increase sustainability-labeled wine consumption

An integrated environmental and fairtrade labelling scheme for product supply chains

Environmental initiatives such as carbon labelling have been suggested as a driver for achieving sustainable production systems of product supply chains. The paper therefore presents a systematic process of developing an environmental labelling framework as an extension of carbon labelling using the fairtrade certification as a platform to facilitate the process. Using the general theoretical constructs of lifecycle assessments, the framework presented provides insight into the formulation of multi-regional supply chains which has been specifically characterised in this paper for the UK-India-Rest of the World supply chain. The environmental labelling process presented in this paper is based on two key principles; Quantitative Principle in Eco-labelling and the Principle of Whole Lifecycle Perspective and it is used to inform two key stakeholder groups in the supply chain: consumers and supply chain partners. For consumers, a consistent way of presenting the environmental label information is presented highlighting the supply chain impacts across the indicators of CO2-eq emissions, water consumption and land use in addition to regional contributions to these impacts from a global supply chain perspective. Additionally, communicating the environmental impacts to supply chain partners provides a decision support to take actions to reduce the overall impacts by identifying processes within the global supply chain that needed prioritization. Given that fairtrade partnership is based on participatory development and a strict guidelines and standardization process, it is envisaged that synergies can be derived by integrating environmental labelling with the fairtrade scheme to enhance the environmental sustainability of product supply chains