Slowing sustainable development

A lack of collaboration and cooperation is standing in the way to a real improvement in sustainability performance. Businesses, cooperations and scientists should stop developing more indicators and standards; and instead work together to rise to the challenges of sustainable development. Also find out what the mountain bike industry has got to do with it all.

The New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard (NZSD) began with a grand vision to develop a single dashboard system to monitor sustainability performance across multiple agricultural sectors in NZ. The ‘dashboard’ would be a single port of call, with the ability to tailor assessments to each industry’s unique requirements. The grand vision was never realised. Not due to any technical limitations, but rather due to apprehension for a shared system on the part of different industries. This apprehension had many aspects; the perception that the sustainability challenges they faced were exclusive to them, anxiety towards data transparency and security, and a loss of control over their own sustainability direction, to name a few. In the end, the NZSD helped develop tailored systems within each industry, and the project acronym gained a P, becoming the New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard Project (NZSDP) to reflect the departure from the original vision. It is understandable that industries were wary. However, the ongoing proliferation of sustainability systems is limiting progress on sustainable development.

The creation of multiple new and unique sustainability systems is a significant issue in sustainability and a threat to the accurate measurement and reporting of sustainability performance. Sustainability assessment is in its infancy, and thousands of different approaches, standards, certifications, labels, and systems are still being developed.

While there has been some consolidation around major standards such as GRI and IR, the largely voluntary nature of sustainability means that even standardised systems are being implemented in an ad-hoc and often inadequate manner. The International Trade Centre’s (ITC) sustainability map, run out of the UN tracks 261 sustainability standards. A search for sustainability standards applicable to ‘wine’ produced in ‘New Zealand’ reveals 37 possible sustainability standards. This list is not complete; it does not even include Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand (SWNZ), which is the premier standard for NZ wine. The abundance of standards creates confusion for consumers and allows producers without a strong commitment to sustainability to potentially select a standard to reduce the impact on their operations rather than to optimise performance.

As an avid lifelong mountain biker, I want to use the development of mountain bike (MTB) technology to illustrate the problems I see with the current state of sustainability assessment. Initially, a mountain bike was a bike much like any other bike before. Beginning in the ’90s however, bike builders began to experiment with new ways to improve the riding experience by adding rear suspension (amongst other innovations). Throughout the ’90s, hundreds of unique and often wacky suspension designs were created as companies tried to distinguish themselves and improve bike performance. Over the next two decades, however, suspension designs began to consolidate around four or so basic designs. Why? Because they worked best. After experimentation and creativity came optimisation. Multiple bike companies now sell very similar looking bikes, distinguishing themselves only through unique tweaks to core designs.

Example of a modern Mountainbike design from three different companies

Sustainability assessment, despite having been developed over many decades, has not experienced this consolidation. In many ways, it is still in the 90’s era of creation and experimentation. However, at the core of every sustainability system are the same big issues – land, climate, water, waste, people, and capital. It is in the mitigation and improvement of these issues that there exist unique challenges for different industries.

Adopting a shared platform for sustainability assessment would not reduce opportunities for differentiation but would instead allow for optimisation on shared challenges while still allowing companies to differentiate themselves with unique responses and initiatives.

The proliferation of sustainability systems is not limited to industry and business. In 2018, alongside two co-authors, I undertook a literature review to evaluate whether academic papers on farm-level sustainability assessment discuss the implementation of sustainability on farms. We identified 153 relevant papers, of which only one paper briefly discussed how the sustainability assessments have been implemented by farmers and have contributed to change. The majority of papers discussed new novel ways for monitoring sustainability, such as developing new indicators or proposing new data gathering methods. There are tens of thousands of indicators and metrics now available to anyone wanting to monitor sustainability, and thousands of standards and systems to align with. Developing more from scratch is often unnecessary and distracts from the real challenge of improving sustainability performance on the ground. Resources need to be shifted to implementation and optimisation rather than development.

The reasons why scientists are developing new sustainability systems, rather than implementing existing systems, or monitoring established systems, is likely due to many of the same reasons that industries and companies are developing their own systems; primarily, it is more comfortable. Developers of a system have control over what is measured, how it is measured, who has access to data, and what the message being communicated externally will be. It is not difficult to see why this is more comfortable, especially for a business, but also, how this could lead to a less than robust sustainability assessment, particularly where sustainability results are less than favourable. The largest challenge I believe many industries face in addressing sustainability is how to allocate their often-limited resources to make the largest impact. This is a decision-making challenge requiring a multi-stakeholder understanding of which sustainability issues matter most, and where an individual, business, or industry can have the largest impact. In sustainability, this often comes under the banner of materiality assessment. However, much like sustainability assessment, materiality assessment is often unstructured, weak, and open to bias. Through projects with the wine industry, the kiwifruit industry, Ngāi Tahu, and currently, the Ballance Farm Environment Awards we have been working to improve the robustness of materiality assessment and provide decision-makers with accurate data which can help them optimise the impact of their sustainability initiatives through careful allocation of resources.

While I believe consolidation and standardisation are required to improve the reliability of sustainability assessment, this consolidation must reflect a multitude of stakeholders, businesses, and their interests. A Google-esque central point of access to information on sustainability could present an even greater threat than the current diversification of approaches. I still believe in the original vision of the NZSD that there could exist a shared platform for sustainability assessment in NZ.

This system would allow for cross-industry and multi-scale comparisons of performance as well as leveraging multiple resources and knowledge across industries to improve sustainability performance. It would provide a basis for communicating NZ’s credentials to the world and create a shared marketing base for exporters. The creation of such a system is not a technical challenge; the technology already exists and is not complicated. The challenge is one of collaboration, cooperation, and a genuine desire to address sustainability concerns on the part of multiple stakeholder groups. If a group of large and respected industries were to collaborate on a shared sustainability approach, they would generate a powerful nexus around which others would coalesce. The wealth of indicators and experiences already developed in these industries could be combined and refined into a powerful shared system, focused on sustainability performance enhancement.

We do not need new indicators, new frameworks, new standards, or new methods for gathering data. What we need is the robust implementation of actions to improve sustainability performance. While there will always be gaps in the science, the current knowledge around key sustainability issues is sufficient to intervene. What is the worst that could happen if we mitigate impacts or enhance benefits? We accidently do something good for the environment or society that turns out to have been 'unnecessary'. We clean up a river beyond the minimum requirements, we give seasonal workers more than a minimal habitable standard of accommodation.

Leadership for sustainable development needs to come from industry and business, with support from science and government. The Sustainability Consortium has done it in North America at a trillion-dollar scale which is something I will write about soon. In a small country, where business and industry leaders are often already acquainted with each other, NZ should be capable of building an enviable national-level sustainability system. Sustainability assessment is trapped in analysis paralysis. The solution is to move beyond indicator and system development to the shared implementation of common sustainability requirements.

Quicklinks: The New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard Project, ITC’s sustainability map, literature review on farm-level sustainability assessments, Materiality Analysis using Big Data

Author: Jay Whitehead