Blog

SDG zero: Strategic Directional Guidance

At last week’s Ethical Corp conference in London there was a round-table session on the SDGs and how they should be incorporated into strategy. The various discussion groups included representatives from a range of sectors and nationalities, but the conclusions were broadly consistent. The group recognised that the SDGs are inter-linked and can be hard to translate into the day-to-day of business. Because of that, they are often best treated as qualitative rather than quantitative. Nevertheless, they can be used to inform debate and are useful in providing a common language for collaboration along the value chain.

The easiest route for companies wishing to engage is to start with an existing project (or more than one) and use it to develop the overall concept of how they can work with the SDGs. The decision as to where to engage should, as ever, be informed by materiality assessments to determine priorities and organisations should pick a few of the Goals which are most relevant to their circumstances. Multi-dimensional outputs maximise the impact of any activity and should be sought wherever possible.

Reporting for reporting’s sake is a risk to be avoided. Only say things which are worth saying and have improvement as the objective rather than simple reporting and compliance. Develop a strategy and embed it in management and reward structures where you can. Organisations should reflect on the negative as well as the positive impacts of their activities, especially when reporting on outcomes which are merely incidental consequences of ‘business as usual’.

I’m writing this in the middle of Green GB week, the UK government’s ‘landmark week of action to accelerate clean growth’. Planned to become an annual event, and in partnership with my old friends at edie (see ‘Bees, Leas and SDGs’ and other posts), the focus is on highlighting the opportunities that clean growth offers the UK and raising understanding of how business and the public can contribute to tackling climate change. This is a clear prioritisation of economic drivers, but that is inevitably the best way to engage business and a powerful incentive for citizens. With both of the UK’s major national political parties now talking about extending the Climate Change Act to 100% decarbonisation, the opening day of Green GB week saw the UK government approach the independent advisory Committee on Climate Change chaired by Lord Deben (see ‘Policy and Practice’) for advice on when and how to move towards a zero-carbon economy. Notably, BEIIS is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Climate Change Act which came into law into a different party’s administration, so just maybe the issue is finally starting to become pre-competitive.

The government’s approach to the CCC was apparently prompted by the previous week’s release of the UN report warning (again!) that carbon emissions must be halted completely in order to avoid dangerous climate disruption leading to conditions such as the extreme rainfall in Kerala mentioned in an earlier post (see ‘Weather or Not’). Unsurprisingly from BEIS, there is a significant focus on topics that fall under the general aegis of SDG7 (clean and affordable energy) and SDG9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure) but carbon management cuts across all sectors. Depending on which figures you use, the global Agri-food system accounts for 20-30% of global emissions. Given the amount of government effort devoted to the ongoing saga that is Brexit, it is perhaps heartening that time has been found to address this particular issue. Time will tell whether this will lead to longer-term policy changes and I’ll return to the subject as it develops.

There aren’t enough days in the year to fit in all of the initiatives organised by private, public and third sector actors, and Tuesday 16th October was also World Food Day. You can see from the image above that even the FAO’s toolkit steps outside SDG2 into (at least) the territory of SDG12 and SDG3, which serves to underline the inter-connectedness noted above. By coincidence, next week I’ll be one of the speakers at an SDG-themed conference at the Grantham Centre at the University of Sheffield where I’ll be speaking to the topic of SDG2 Zero Hunger from the perspective of the Agri-food sector. There will be more on the conference in the next post, so please come back in a couple of weeks.

Finally, at this week’s Sedex Stakeholders Forum meeting, there was a formal announcement of the launch of a range of resources designed to assist Sedex members in their engagement with the SDGs. I’ve been involved in this initiative from its inception and it’s great to see it come to fruition with some practical content designed to help companies engage not just with the subject at Goal level, but getting deeper into the detail of interpreting the targets and the type of actions that businesses can take to make a contribution at that level. Inevitably this resource will develop over time as there is feedback from users and as the SDGs gain a higher profile in the next few years, and I look forward to continuing to play a part in that development.

All Too Real

Modern Slavery is a term with which people sometimes struggle to connect, evoking as it does – despite the word ‘Modern’ – images of a past that we would all like to think of as distant. Instances such as that reported in the UK media earlier this week of a 58-year-old British man rescued after living for 40 years in a shed on a residential site north of Carlisle, seem utterly incredible in a modern developed economy. By coincidence, this report came in the very week that the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) launched new licensing standards in a bid to better protect vulnerable and exploited workers. The launch follows a consultation over the summer and approval from the GLAA board, setting out the conditions which applicants must meet to get a GLAA licence. They are all legal requirements to protect workers from poor treatment and exploitation, covering issues such as working hours, training and the National Minimum Wage.

Last week I was one of the delegates at the “4th Modern Slavery & Human Rights in Supply Chain Conference” considering, amongst other topics, the current and future implications of the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) of 2015, a piece of legislation which has had an impact well beyond the UK. Requiring organisations of above £36m turnover which are active in the UK to state publicly what steps they are taking to combat modern slavery and human trafficking in their supply chains, the MSA has had an understandable impact on businesses around the world in supply chains leading to the UK, and Australia is shortly to introduce something very similar. My part at the conference was to facilitate round-table discussions on the integration of modern slavery issues into a broader risk management context. There were 2 discussion groups comprising representatives from a wide range of sectors but, as is so often the case, many of the challenges were common. The MSA has led to increased pressure for disclosure and compliance, primarily from investors and NGOs; to quote from last week’s Investors Chronicle, “A wave of regulation and growing customer awareness of social and environmental issues means ethics now have a genuine effect on the bottom line – and that means investors can no longer ignore how clean (or dirty) a company’s profits are”. Although modern slavery isn’t a new phenomenon, as evidenced by the decades-long suspected abuse noted above, it is a relatively new topic in terms of policy. There was a general expectation that it would, over time, become as mainstream as Health and Safety and it has been propelled into Boardrooms by the backing of the Act. There is always the risk of unintended consequences in any change, and several of the contributors felt that the focus on modern slavery had taken resource away from other areas. That said, a positive consequence, possibly equally unforeseen, is that the MSA appears to be encouraging more recognition of other human rights issues in supply chains.

October 18th is Anti-Slavery Day, an annual event raising awareness of the issue of human trafficking and modern slavery. ‘Official’ figures for the numbers of people in the UK suffering modern-day slavery fall rather short of estimate of 10,000+ from those working in the area but, inevitably, firm numbers are hard to find. For a modern industrialised liberal democracy, that is a shocking and shaming number and, tragically, 40% of people rescued from modern slavery are re-trafficked, a key driver of which is a lack of economic independence. One remarkable initiative seeking to stem this is Bright Future, started by the Coop and supported (at the time of writing) by 14 other businesses and 21 charities. The member organisations use their specific resources to help get rescued victims financially on their feet. This might be by access to banking facilities, clothing for interviews or, in the case of the Coop, a pathway to paid employment. Not all of us can provide such a degree of help, but we can all help lobby politicians for improved support for former victims. Lord McColl of Dulwich has brought forward a Bill in the House of Lords to give victims in England and Wales (this is a devolved responsibility in Scotland and Northern Ireland) a guaranteed right to support for 12 months. At https://freeforgood.org.uk/#take-action you can directly contact your MP to ask them to support the bill.

Weather Or Not

The long hot summer seems to be drawing to an end, which will come as a relief to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. We’ve had hot weather for so long that wearing long trousers seems almost novel. Wildfires in unexpected places or of unusual size and ferocity have been a commonplace and the recent rain (in northern Europe at least) will put an end to that particular facet of global warming for a while, although the next few years are predicted to see more warm conditions during this El Nino cycle. The impact on crop yields remains something of an unknown; significant quantities of water after a long dry spell will contribute to increased potato scab and other problems (the picture below is from the 2017 crop, not this year). Recent warnings from various sources that food shortages are a likely outcome of a ‘no deal’ Brexit only add to the unwelcome prospect of a poor harvest. At the other end of extreme climatic events, the south Indian state of Kerala has been experiencing devastating excesses of rain rather than the paucity we have seen in Europe.

Last week saw the publication of two rather sobering reports, one from the Global Footprint Network on the apparently inexorable shortening of the time until Earth Overshoot Day (1st August this year, the earliest since the index was launched in 1969) and one by an international team of climate researchers, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, warning that the warming expected in the next few decades could turn carbon sinks into sources and make the problems of climate change significantly worse. This isn’t necessarily new news for those of us who work in sustainability, but perhaps it will reach a new audience. A small glimmer of hope is that the Earth Overshoot report was picked up by HSBC, and the message thereby reached the global financial community in a way that it might not have done if was only being discussed by NGOs. Warning that governments and business are under-prepared for the impacts of climate change, HSBC’s analysts pointed out the severe economic and social costs of extreme weather events saying that “In our view, adaptation will move further up the agenda with a growing focus on the social consequences”. Global finance may turn out to be an unlikely saviour!

Also recently published is a report by DNV-GL containing the results of a survey on how WBCSD members and organizations that make up WBCSD’s Global Network are engaging with the SDGs. Even among this group engagement isn’t universal (1 in 8 ‘have no concrete engagement with the SDGs yet’), but more hearteningly perhaps, slightly more than 1 in 3 are considering their negative as well as their positive impacts on the Goals. There are some of the usual disparities between what is and isn’t viewed as strategic within the Goals; Climate Action (SDG13) comes out as top of the list and Life Below Water (SDG14) languishes at the bottom as is so often the case. Regional variations were less apparent in this report than has been the case in other surveys over the past 1 months, but the WBCSD-centred respondents were less diverse than in most surveys which might go some way to explaining it. Deforestation is becoming a major issue (the carbon-sink benefit of forests is well-known and its possible reversal at higher warming temperatures was one of the subjects of the report in PNAS) and has been cited as a contributor to the flooding in Kerala arising from the heavy rainfall mentioned above but the oceans are less-well publicised either as carbon and heat sinks or as oases of biodiversity.

One of the conference speakers at the Food Matters Live trade show in November (see https://www.foodmatterslive.com/2018) will be James Honeyborne, Executive Producer of the award-winning Blue Planet II documentary (you don’t need telling that I’ve mentioned it here before). He will be discussing how the learnings from the series has created a global phenomenon in raising awareness of plastic pollution and why building on the impact is so important to provide a global solution. It’s a food show, hence the focus on plastics (although much ocean plastic doesn’t derive from food of course) but I hope that he will use the voice that the success of the programme has given him to address other issues impacting on the health of the world’s oceans.

Rappel La Différence

Claude Monet was a regular visit to the coast at Varengeville sur Mer, best-known now for its Gertrude Jekyll-designed garden around an Edwin Lutyens manor house. The picture below of a yacht on the channel serves as an inadvertent homage to impressionism (simply by virtue of it being a zoom into a digital zoom). On that part of the coast, crêpes and moules et frites are far less in evidence that might have been expected.

A long queue had formed at the stall at Dieppe market pictured below, where a chap named Botek was selling traditional Turkish flatbreads (boasting a 100-year family history) with a variety of fillings using local Normand ingredients. A little bit of fusion, although not much, but what was more notable – to me at least – was the standard of food hygiene. You can see in the picture below that 2 of the 3 people on the stall are wearing disposable gloves (albeit not blue) which were changed periodically whilst the queue moved on and Botek himself always removed his when handling cash.

From one end of the food chain to the other, the Normandy economy features all sorts of food and drink, of course, not just the artisanal. The road out of a small town nestled in the rolling countryside runs past a fairly large frozen food manufacturer, Gelaé, specialising here in vegetable products. Their website reports that the “company promotes local sourcing where possible, especially in vegetables, and therefore contributes to the development of the local economy by promoting the employment of staff from the regions in which the production sites are established”. Admirable indeed, and from its size the site must be a significant employer in the area. On the subject of artisanal, it is notable that local boulangeries often now describe themselves as artisanal on their fascias. The distinction is presumably related to supermarket baguettes rather than sandwich bread, but is another indicator of the slow drift in French food culture that I referenced in the previous post (see ‘Vive La Différence’).

Changes at the agricultural end of the agri-food system can be seen at the local cultural centre in Blangy sur Bresle (pictured on the left below). There are a number of different sections to the museum, one of which contains agricultural implements dating back a century and more. The manual labour required to operate many of these is clearly a world away from the mechanical agriculture practiced today. Other industries were the same, with children as young as 6 working in the glass industry in the area lugging around moulds weighing up to 15kg. The advent of industrialised techniques made for lighter work, but it also made for less work in the countryside. The legacy of this can be seen across Normandy today, as it can in the UK, with very little employment in agriculture.

It has been an interesting visit experiencing aspects of the agri-food system in a nearby but still different culture. The balance between small and large is different to the UK, but the individual components are very similar. Small differences persist and make for the attraction of travel alongside the experience of specific food and drink. I’ve been enjoying fresh baguettes for as long as I can remember, as soon off the ferry as possible, and long may it continue.

Vive La Différence

More of a travelogue than a normal blog post this week, as I’m on holiday in Normandy. Globalisation has seen off many of the cultural differences between France, the UK and other European countries, but there are still some distinctions. Small supermarkets still have the aroma I remember from my youth, which I take to be the combined smell of all sorts of fresh produce open to the atmosphere. There have been many technological changes since I worked in the fruit and veg department of a grocery store in Switzerland during university holidays, some relating to how food is packaged, some relating to temperature control and some relating to the types of produce sold and how far it has travelled to reach shoppers’ baskets. It is noteworthy, though, that when Aldi and Lidl first opened in the UK they still had that smell, but it has now all but disappeared. Some of it still lingers on in Normandy at least, where even a hypermarket retains something of a local market feel in the grocery section.

Travelling round in an electric vehicle, there are plenty of wind turbines to be seen, some of the output from which was perhaps powering our journeys. France has a fairly low-carbon grid, with nuclear and hydro being long-standing contributors to the mix. Nuclear is not without its controversies, of course, but there is a growing contribution from other renewables than hydro as can be seen in the picture below. The wheat harvest has taken advantage of the same heatwave conditions as the UK has seen over the last couple of months, although whether overall yields have weathered the conditions remains to be seen. The fields of maize that have always been such a feature of the French countryside look less exotic in these days of energy crops being grown across England for anaerobic digestion.

The contrast from last year’s rain is striking. The annual YNOT festival in Derbyshire was cut short in 2017 because of a waterlogged site (see photo below), whereas this year the ground had more in common with the mid-West dust bowl of the 1930s than the quagmire that it became last year after thousands of pairs of feet had trudged to and fro through the waterlogged fields for 48 hours. The rain broke the weeks-long dry spell during YNOT 2018, but the parched ground simply soaked up the moisture.

In the realm of food and drink, Normandy is probably best known for Camembert and Calvados, but there is plenty of other local produce including pastries, seafood, sausages and beef dishes and many more types of cheese. The town of Neufchatel en Bray is even named after a type of local cheese (the characteristic heart-shape of which can be seen in the picture below). All of this and more can be found at Dieppe’s huge Saturday market and others across the region.

By coincidence, the case study on the LCA course I mentioned in the previous post (see ‘What Goes Around…’) was the production of cider using data from France and Italy. Visiting a smallholder cider apple orchard and cider maker was, therefore, an almost obligatory research trip. The reality of the activity on the ground shows the limitations of LCA as a technique and why it is difficult to generalise from limited data sets. This particular farm, started by the owners 22 years ago, has 15 different apple varieties (all of which will have differing pest and disease resistance characteristics) and a mixture of high-stem and – predominantly – short-stem tree forms. Cattle are able to graze under the branches of the high-stem trees but under the short-stem trees, grass and weeds have to be kept in check by other means. Access to the orchard is along a narrow high-sided track (a relic of the characteristic Normand bocage) making access nigh-on impossible for large-scale agricultural equipment. This particular combination of varieties, husbandry, geography and the philosophy of the owners is unlikely to be exactly replicated at any other cider producer in Normandy or elsewhere, so any LCA applied to the operation using data collected from another producer could only be a guide rather than a definitive reflection of what is done there.

À bientôt!

What Goes Around…

I’ve spent a couple of days this week on a course learning more about Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). I’ve talked about them before, specifically in the context of the environmental impact of wrapped and unwrapped cucumbers (see ‘It Really Is Rocket Science’), but this was a more general investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of the technique. Organised by FoodWasteNet and delivered primarily by academics from University College London, the course was attended by industrialists and researchers. Availability of credible data is sometimes a challenge, in large part because the necessary measurements are complex (and inevitably expensive) and there is huge variation in resource consumption even within a sector. The current extreme weather conditions for instance will, clearly, result in levels of water consumption well above the norm and is having significant impacts across the agri-food system and beyond. The picture below shows a parched field in the usually lush Peak District national park.

Another challenge is in making assumptions around what might or might not happen when people become a part of the system. By way of illustration, a report released this week by the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted that over half of the packaging reported within UK data collection systems as recycled is being sent abroad to be processed. And this is after the Chinese government’s decision to halt imports of UK plastic waste from the start of this year. As a result, it says, consumers who are diligently doing the right thing in their homes and beyond can’t know whether the recyclables are getting turned into new products, buried in landfill or burned. Reflecting this accurately in LCA calculations is all but impossible. The general value of LCAs is in identifying broad-brush pictures. Too much granularity may well result in mis-directed outcomes.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a global strategy for achieving economic growth that is consistent with the planet’s capacity, society’s basic needs and the capabilities and stability of the economy. Regular readers will have encountered them in many previous posts (‘Supply Chain Reaction’, ‘Bees, Leas and SDGs’ and ‘Owned Goals’ to name a few). This week saw a meeting organised by the ONS Economic Forum exploring inclusive growth, inequality and the value of urban green-space in the context of the SDGs. This is not a perspective which I have covered before, but it reflects some of the features of the UK public’s priorities which I talked about in ‘Supply Chain Reaction’. The SDGs are best thought of as an inter-connected system rather than 17 discrete areas of endeavour and each of them in turn covers a range of considerations. SDG3 (Good Health and Well-being), SDG8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth), SDG10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG15 (Life on Land) were all evoked in the event title, but all of those concepts could be reasonably viewed in this context as aspects of SDG11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.

Linking the events was the theme of data and metrics. The (now rather trite) and contested old saying that ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’ – attributed to Peter Drucker – captures a basic truth. Decisions have to be based on something. This doesn’t necessarily translate into a need for formal metrics, but it does speak to the need for understanding the context of observations. LCAs are often compiled within boundaries which are defined as much by available data as by a meaningful description of the bounds of a system. Back in my high school days our maths teacher summed this up rather neatly; you need to know 90% of the answer to a question even before it is asked. This is all about understanding boundaries and is as true now as it was then.

The Only Way Is Ethics

This week I was at the quarterly Board meeting of Sedex, the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange, the focus of which is “to make it easier to do business that’s good for everyone”. The range of subjects that could be reflected in the ethical policy of a business is broad and Sedex has a strong focus on the human element in the workplace. From our perspective in a G7 economy it is easy to think of human rights issues as being a problem that exists ‘somewhere else’, but with compliance with the UK’s Modern Slavery Act at only around 30% it may not be as clear cut as we would like to think. A number of other events during the week reflected some of the other angles of business ethics.
One of the informal groups of which I’m a member held one of its occasional dinner meetings this week to debate the plastics issue and the implications of what is currently happening within the food industry and beyond. Hosted by one of the members, we had a great view of Tower Bridge as we ate and talked. I’ve written about plastics before (see ‘It’s Not In The Bag Yet’, ‘Blue Planet Blues’ and other posts) and developments continue apace. Barely a week goes by without another announcement from a food manufacturer or retailer about changes they are making. Iceland seems to have received the most coverage, but in the last few days we’ve also seen announcements from Ikea, Morrison’s and Coca-Cola. The public response remains strong and not just in the UK. The Indian government has pledged to eliminate all single-use plastic by 2022 in a move hailed by the UN’s Environment chief Erik Solheim as providing “global leadership” where the rest of the world was falling short. This type of activity would normally be labelled as ‘environmental’ rather than ‘ethical’, but I would contend that taking action to deliver environmental or social benefit is to behave ethically.

Finally, I was one of the attendees at a meeting organised by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the role that science and technology can play in the future of food sustainability in the UK. NCoB is an independent body that examines and reports on ethical issues in biology and medicine, which is funded jointly by the Nuffield Foundation, Wellcome and the Medical Research Council and serves as an independent non-partisan think tank. Attended mostly by academics and NGOs, with a smattering of industry representatives, the meeting discussed a number of topics including the key challenges, research and innovation needs and the social implication of change. With the date of the UK’s departure from the EU coming ever closer, Britain’s food system will inevitably undergo significant changes and the discussions at the event were part of a much larger debate around how that will look. Much of the debate centred on the social sciences rather than biology and chemistry, reflecting the importance of behaviours and public opinion in the success and acceptance of a new system.

Whilst there I bumped into Patrick Holden CBE, chief executive of the Sustainable Food Trust. The SFT is a charity campaigning for food and farming systems which nourish the health of the planet and its people, which late last year published a report on the hidden cost of food. Internalising externalities is a necessary part of the change that we need in the agri-food system and the report highlights the costs, environmental and social, that aren’t paid at the supermarket checkout but are encountered elsewhere. It makes for sobering reading, concluding that the true cost of food is double the display price, with most of the external costs arising from diet-related ill-health and environmental degradation.
There are environmental and social consequences of the choices we all make in our diets which go far beyond the impacts on our own personal health. With smartphones in almost every hand, access to information has never been easier, but that doesn’t guarantee that knowledge of the impacts of food choices is widespread or that there is universal agreement on the ‘facts’. The Food Ethics Council has recently published a report entitled ‘For Whom? Questioning the Food and Farming Research Agenda’ which looks into this topic in some detail, which is well worth a read.

It Really Is Rocket Science

Or at least, the surroundings were. Recently I chaired a meeting of FoodWasteNet at the National Space Centre in Leicester. No link with space exploration, they just rent out meeting rooms. Although there was some impressive science discussed at the meeting, I very much doubt that any of the presenters would have claimed that their work was a match for the literally space-age engineering in the halls around us.

The specific purpose of the meeting was to address complex multi-component waste streams arising from food manufacturing operations and the delegates were treated to a tour round a nearby sandwich manufacturing site. Thanks to the team at Samworth Brothers for adding this extra interest to the meeting. Along with 12 other BBSRC-funded networks, FWN exists to bring together researchers, entrepreneurs and manufacturers in a forum to find solutions to the challenge of food waste. Globally, around one-third of food isn’t consumed and anything that is genuinely unavoidable could potentially be used to produce useful platform chemicals and other materials. Of course, this should be the last resort; finding ways to keep the food edible and getting it eaten must be the first priority and it is a specific target within the UN Sustainable Development Goals, attracting its own collaborative effort ‘Champions 12.3′. I’ve mentioned the issue of cucumber wrapping in a few conference talks recently (see the ‘Supply Chain Reaction’ and ‘Bees, Leas and SDGs’ posts) including my contribution to a panel discussing the adoption of new technologies at the N8 conference in Liverpool (pictured below). Thanks to Wayne Martindale of Lincoln University for arranging the invitation to join the panel.

There is widespread public mis-trust of plastic wrapping for understandable reasons, although the science is unequivocal; wrapping extends the life of cucumbers and the emissions embedded in the fruit are far more significant than the emissions embedded in the wrapping. But… does that inevitably result in the cucumber being eaten rather than wasted? For that to happen, there must be appropriate behaviour by the consumer and there is no guarantee of that, especially if people aren’t aware of the facts or aren’t prepared to make any compromise on product quality. Sainsbury’s, and no doubt other grocery retailers, are engaging in publicity over the benefits of wrapping (see below), so it will be interesting to see how it works out. The public reaction to ocean plastics, albeit 30 years after the issue was first postulated, may mitigate against it in the short term.

I was also invited by the IFSTAL team to host a discussion table at their session, which was designed to publicise what the initiative does to provide broad education around the agri-food system. Acknowledging that it is indeed a system and recognising that a better understanding of the system will almost inevitably lead to improved application in its individual component parts. I’m a great fan of what the IFSTAL team do and as I type this part of the blog I’m en route to help out at their annual summer school.

One of the highlights of the N8 conference which I mentioned in the previous post (‘Supply Chain Reaction’} was the talk by cross-bench peer Professor The Lord Sandy Trees, pictured with me below, who spoke about some of the potential impacts of Brexit on the UK’s food system. Interesting, insightful and illuminating in equal measure, the presentation was a well-made reminder that science has to exist in the context of policy. Chatting to him after the conference dinner – being a peer doesn’t mean you’re unapproachable – I discovered that Lord Trees went to school just a few miles away from where I currently live. Small world.

In between N8 and FWN, I was one of around 100 attendees at a conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Food Ethics Council. Entitled ‘The Future of Food – All Things Considered’ the event was both a celebration of the organisation’s past and an exploration of priorities for the future. Below you can see a timeline of the FEC’s activities over the last 2 decades. In my corporate life I attend FEC discussion events which are invariably instructive and thought-provoking. Well done to Dan Crossley and colleagues at FEC for putting it all together.

Finally, another IFSTAL event (it’s obviously that time of year) with a trip to Reading to contribute to their annual summer school. I’ve written about IFSTAL before and I’m a great fan of what the initiative does, which is to provide insights across the food system to post-graduate students from a range of disciplines related to food and agriculture. The summer school covers all sorts of topics including communication and team-working skills, analytical tools and workplace experience. My part was as one of the workplace representatives giving the students an insight into how career paths can develop. The other contributors were from York University, Public Health England and Mack Fruit (a large importer of exotic fruits). Each speaker gave a presentation on their own career and then held a series of Q&A sessions with groups of delegates.

The students were interested in my career path of course (not as planned as they expected, but that was also true of the other workplace contributors). They were perhaps even more interested in my thoughts on a few of the difficult sustainability issues of the day. I was able to help provide some context and informed opinion, but if I’d had the ‘real’ answers I’d be working at the UN…

Supply Chain Reaction

This week I was invited (wearing my corporate hat) to speak at an event run by Global Insight Conferences, focused on the food and drink supply chain. My contribution was the only part of the day addressing sustainability and the brief was to address ‘strategies to drive sustainability in supply chains’. The event featured live feedback from delegates provided by OMBEA represented by the very helpful Mitt Nathwani, who kindly collected the voting results for me which made it much easier for me to discuss them here. The facility worked quickly and seamlessly and added a great extra dimension to the event. I used the system first to reprise the sense of work I’ve talked about in previous posts (see the ‘Farms, Forks & In Between’ post), around what people understand by the word ‘sustainability’. With limited time, I used a cut-down version, asking the audience to choose one preferred definition from environmental protection, social development, economic success and long-term resilience. The environment came out as the overwhelming favourite which set the scene rather neatly for a discussion around the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework for defining what sustainable organisations look like. I also asked which group in society has the most responsibility for delivery sustainability and, contrary to past responses, private individuals were the most favoured whereas that group is usually in third place (see the ‘Blue Planet Blues’ post) of the choices (A-government, B-business, C-individuals and D-civil society), the results of which are shown in an OMBEA chart below.

Regular readers of this blog will know that the SDGs represent a highly robust framework around which to develop a sustainability strategy (see the ‘Owned Goals’ post) and I used them as a key part of the presentation structure but also included a number of pieces of work on what consumers look for from businesses and how corporations respond (or not). Encouragingly, half of the audience reported some or significant knowledge of the Goals, which is a higher proportion than might normally be expected, with only one in six completely unfamiliar with them. Of course, this group was not representative of the public at large, or even necessarily people within the food industry, as they had elected to attend a conference discussing “efficient, collaborative, innovative” supply chains, but it is still reason for hope that the SDGs are becoming more mainstream.
Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) published some work last year comparing UK corporate and citizen priorities within the SDGs and what follows is (my rather than their) speculation on the findings. Business priorities were found to be Gender Equality (SDG 5), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8) and Climate Action (SDG 13). With gender pay gap reporting high on the corporate agenda over the past 12 months, that might explain the presence of SDG 5 when past work by Globescan has found the European ‘top 3’ to be Climate Action, Quality Education (SDG 4) and Responsible Consumption & Production (SDG 12). Citizen priorities were Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Good Health and Wellbeing (SDG 3) and No Poverty (SDG 1), which ae clearly miles apart from the corporate priorities; indeed SDG 1 was in the bottom three business priorities. This citizen ranking may well be related to the widespread publicity received in 2017 by food banks and the social issues they are there to address, but this is again speculation on my part.

I used the six Goals noted above for part of the audience feedback through Ombea, asking delegates to pick the one they considered the most important and the one they considered the least important. This was before they saw the PwC work so there was no ‘leading the witness’. The responses cut across PwC’s findings, with Climate Action and Good Health & Wellbeing coming joint top closely followed by Zero Hunger. Much more surprisingly, at 45% the clear leader as ‘least important’ was Gender Equality followed some distance behind by Decent Work and Economic Growth. The gender balance in the group was around 2:1 in favour of men, which may or may not be relevant; I would prefer to think that the responses represent the UK’s legal landscape in which gender equality is protected by law (highly imperfect though this turns out to be in practice) and therefore some of the other issues might seem to have greater urgency. More positively, at another event where I spoke later in the week (the N8 Agri-Food Annual Conference in Liverpool, of which there will be more in a future post) the overall speaker faculty managed 45% representation by women, a tidy coincidence with the figure noted above. Not quite parity, but close.

So, what does this tell us? Firstly, and most importantly, it illustrates the fact that there can be no simple answers because there is no consensus on the priorities. Surveys routinely show variation in priorities (as expressed by ranking of the SDGs) across geographies and industry sectors, but even in a single room containing people who might be expected to be broadly similar in experience and outlook, given why they were there, the differences are significant and notable. Beware the purveyor of the ‘silver bullet’; systems problems are rarely susceptible to simple solutions. Secondly, it shows that the concept of sustainability is still closely linked to environmental concerns. As an environmentalist as well as a sustainability professional, I’m not entirely unhappy to see that, but it clearly isn’t the full picture. With more time, I would have liked to explore this with the group further, especially given that the priorities highlighted by PwC’s research were primarily social (it is worth pointing out that other work, by KPMG for example, showed different priorities again). Thirdly, and very positively, it shows that there is an appetite to address the issues, even if there is no one simple way of doing it.

Bees, Leas And SDGs

Prompted by a leaflet at a garden centre and the general plight of pollinators, I have made a modest donation to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. The decline of honeybees attracts quite a bit of attention, but the poor old bumblebee is often left out of the conversation. You’ll probably know that the word dumbledore was an old dialect name for the bumblebee (from Southern England) long before it became a literary wizard. It’s a shame that the entomological variety doesn’t enjoy JK Rowling’s reach and fame. If the picture below (taken in my garden in June 2016) had audio, you would be able to hear the buzzing of dozens of bumblebees. Last year there were noticeably fewer and I hope that was just a consequence of seasonal temperature variation. If you’re interested in helping bumblebees, you can find more information at https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/

I spent 2 days at edie Live at the NEC this week, where I was flattered by playing a part in a number of events. I’ve mentioned before that I work with edie fairly regularly (see ‘Think Global, Act Local’ below, for instance), and congratulations to them on reaching their 20th anniversary. As well as presenting and then taking part in subsequent discussions on the SDGs and the value of water alongside such luminaries as Tesco, WWF and Adnams, I also moderated a workshop on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which brought together delegates from a number of sectors including food, ethical finance, local authority and central government. It was surprisingly unsurprising that the interests brought by the group had so much commonality, irrespective of their sector. Their key goals were to use the SDGs within their reporting and communications, either as a framework or by reflecting them in existing activities.

There was general agreement that the SDGs are not readily made relevant to business, although it isn’t impossible, and that they aren’t yet meaningful enough to or understood by the bulk of citizens. Most people get their information from the general media, where the subject isn’t really covered. Even Blue Planet II, for which I have so much praise for the way it has brought ocean plastics to a wide audience (see ‘It’s Not In The Bag Yet’ below), didn’t use the opportunity to highlight SDG14 as the face of marine protection. The conclusions of the discussion were helpful as a summary of how businesses can interact with the SDGs in a manageable way:

• The SDGs are a useful lens and framing mechanism
• The challenges encapsulated by the SDGs are a systems issue and should be treated as such
• Understanding your key stakeholders’ priorities is essential
• Get to the issues within the system which really matter to you and avoid diluting the resource you have available to address them
• Beware of unintended consequences
• Learn from others, including sectors beyond your own; the issues are often the same but they are likely to have come at things from a different perspective

As part of my presentation on the SDGs, I used the Sustainable Futures project as an example of collaboration to deliver on a number of the Goals. More resource-efficient farming will clearly contribute to reduced hunger (SDG 2), improved profitability & resilience for farming businesses (SDG 8) and better environmental outcomes (SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15), and it will do this through innovation and multi-sector collaboration (SDGs 9 and 17). The project will also be used as a case study within the material produced by Sedex to help their members engage with the Goals. There is more progress expected on the sustainable landscapes component of the project in the next week or so with major funding close to being secured for 2 years of collaboration and innovation across three pilot areas. There was a further preparatory meeting this week around engaging with the iCASP programme based at the University of Leeds which sets out to generate benefits for Yorkshire by applying environmental science to catchment challenges. The project overall is a textbook illustration of the systems nature of the agri—food sector and it is great to see such a wide range of interested stakeholders including NGOs, academia, manufacturers, technology providers and farmers all working together to deliver positive change.