Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators.

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

Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: Assessing Gaps in Key Impact and Vulnerability Issues and Indicators.

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

Number of fully-covered component issues for each integrated issue.

<p>See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s005" target="_blank">S4 Dataset.csv</a> for a full list of component issues.</p

Most and least mentioned Integrated Issues across perspectives (top and bottom 25%).

<p>Most and least mentioned Integrated Issues across perspectives (top and bottom 25%).</p

Forty-four integrated sustainability issues (24 impact and 36 vulnerability).

<p>See Information B in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s001" target="_blank">S1 File</a> for detailed descriptions of each integrated issue.</p

Number of related indicators per integrated issue.

<p>Number of related indicators per integrated issue.</p

Integrated issues linked to sources by perspective.

<p>Each link represents an individual source that mentions the issue. Size of node (and text) corresponds to the number of links. Issue nodes are distributed using a force-directed algorithm (Force Atlas 2 using Gephi 0.8.2) and hence closest to perspectives with which they share the most links. See <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0128752#pone.0128752.s004" target="_blank">S3 Dataset.csv</a> for data on each individual source and their issue links.</p

Percentage of integrated issues considered by each perspective.

<p>Organized sequentially by capital group. Percentage is an average all sampled documents and communications from all three perspectives. Note: Many livelihoods frameworks treat capital groups themselves as very broad issues, and these are not included in this figure. If counted, the breakdown of capital group mentions from the livelihoods perspective is Human (42%), Natural (83%), physical/financial (66.6%), social/political (75%), showing much higher coverage across capital groups, particularly for natural issues.</p