Policy Brief - Your Sustainability Journey
The New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard (NZSD) is a research programme supported with funding from 2012 to 2018 by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment along with several industry partners. During the programme, the research team co-designed tailored dashboards with four different industries, using a process involving seven key steps. This policy brief outlines that process…
Policy Brief - Social Sustainability
Social sustainability indicators should work to address issues of inequality and injustice on several levels of an industry, business, or farm. However, social realities often feature relational, processual and conditional qualities and, as such, present several challenges to researches attempting to measure social sustainability…
Policy Brief - Addressing Power Imbalances in Sustainability Assessment
Recent developments in the sustainability assessment space have seen power being consolidated at the downstream end of supply chains. This trend provides for immense opportunities to drive real sustainability improvements, but also entails risks, particularly for upstream producers…
Policy Brief - Agricultural Sustainability Open Data Standards
In the related Policy Brief Improving Sustainability through Investment in Primary Sector ICT Capabilities and Open Data Standards we presented the opportunity to begin solving the major challenges from increasing data volumes, increasing data complexity and low primary sector ICT capability by defining and adopting open data standards for agricultural sustainability assessment and reporting (SAR)…
Policy Brief - Choice Modelling
Deciding which factors should take priority when setting sustainability targets is a rarely addressed and challenging problem. Questions arise such as; whose interests are the most important?…
Policy Brief - Distributive justice
Fairness or justice is a major concern for all people. If a process is not considered fair, people will not support the process. While there is a growing trend towards improving agricultural sustainability, the implementation and uptake of sustainability initiatives can be improved if burdens imposed on those expected to participate are perceived as fair…
Internationally, there have been many approaches emerge for progressing towards the sustainable management of forests. The main two approaches that have been adopted in New Zealand include: The Forest Stewardship Council Certification Standard (FSC) and the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators (MP). Currently, about 70 per cent of New Zealand’s commercial forests are FSC certified and the industry also voluntarily contributes to the Montreal Process…
Policy Brief - Governance and Sustainability
In 2001 the UN added ‘institutional sustainability’ to their definition of sustainable development. ‘Institution’ refers to the socially-accepted rules or norms governing ‘good’ behaviour in a society. Combined with ‘sustainability’, good behaviour may be understood as actions that maintain social well-being, economic resilience, and ecological integrity. Recently the more applied term ‘governance’ has replaced institutional sustainability. It refers to the rules, practices and processes required to guide good behaviour within society and organizations…
There are thousands of sustainability indicators which could be monitored by an enterprise. A prioritisation helps to establish an imperative for adopting sustainability indicators as well as identifying important gaps in a sustainability trajectory…
Policy Brief - Co-design evidence-based tools to improve sustainability performance
To maintain market access and achieve significant improvements in sustainable land management, we need to empower NZ land managers to make rapid and informed decisions in a cost-effective way. Here we outline a transparent and robust co-design process for developing online sustainability assessment tools, which we tested with a proof-of-concept tool for biodiversity assessments on NZ farms.
A paradigm shift in how New Zealand uses evidence to inform management and policy decisions is required to facilitate a step change in sustainability outcomes.
Research Summary_Indigenous framework
To establish a set of Indigenous sustainability indicators for Māori farming and fishing enterprise, it is crucial to understand what Maori want to sustain. Determining what Māori want to sustain requires an exploration of the Māori worldview…
Research Summary_Individualised benchmarking report
Individualised and national vineyard and winery reports are produced for Sustainable Winegrowing NZ (SWNZ) members in conjunction with the New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard project…
Research Summary_Predicting land-use change impacts on biodiversity
Setting biodiversity management targets often relies on subjective processes such as expert opinion or political pressures from key stakeholders. Other parties may call these targets into question as the processes used to identify them are not clear or repeatable…
Research Summary_Prioritisation of sustainability issues
The NZ Sustainability Dashboard (NZSD) Project is helping NZ primary sectors to undertake effective sustainability assessment and reporting. As part of this, it undertook a piece of work that prioritised sustainability issues for the kiwifruit industry to consider…
Research Summary_Sustainability framework
Building practical tools for sustainability assessment, auditing, reporting and learning is the main aim of the New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard (NZSD) project…
Research Summary_Need for sustainability assessment
The concept of sustainability reporting has been taken up by businesses and organisations of all types and sizes. In addition to assessing and monitoring sustainability performance, agricultural entities are increasingly expected to communicate their progress towards sustainability through sustainability reports…
