WP4 - Next generation sustainability and resilience performance indicators

The aim of WP4 is to identify the next generation of indicators to monitor performance of the food system in delivering healthy diets from a system that is sustainable and resilient. Existing indicators do not succeed in tracing performance as they mainly focus on single aspects such as yield per unit of production, rather than on providing a more holistic performance assessment. Therefore, monitoring and tracing development of the food system requires new and innovative indicators that ascertain that the whole food sector is aligned towards this overarching goal.

This WP will have a multidisciplinary approach, and integrate knowledge from ecology and environmental assessment, animal health and welfare surveillance, economics, social considerations and resilience frameworks to derive relevant and useful indicators of sustainability and resilience performance. The work in WP 4 consider different levels of the system as well as temporal aspects in developing sustainability and resilience indicators. The focus is on developing indicators for the Swedish food system as a whole, as well as for primary production, processing, retailing and consumption of domestically produced food and consumption of imported foods.

Main research questions:

  • What are the next generation key indicators that successfully monitor sustainable performance across its three dimensions - environmental, economic and social, and resilience of the food system - at i) different system levels, ii) actors, iii) territorial levels, and iv) time?
  • How are these indicators correlated across the environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainable development? What are the potential conflicts and synergies between factors measured by the indicators identified by society and different stakeholders in the supply chain?
  • How can indicators be populated with data and used for monitoring and evaluation? What data are available and reliable, and what kind of additional data collection and generation is needed?
  • How can supply chain actors, policy makers and society use indicators for decision making?
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