Farming sustainably - for the long term
Can we measure sustainability?
Establishing a common framework for assessing sustainability is becoming a priority for governments, businesses and individuals the world around; not least as a solution for guiding policy decisions and innovation for food security.
The ‘How green is my apple?’ conference organised by the British Chamber of Commerce in Belgium gathered some of Europe’s leading science, environment, technology and food sector organisations to debate the metrics of sustainability.
Professor, Sir John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, addressed the challenges of measuring sustainability - in order to improve decision making - and drew parallels between discussions and the findings of the landmark Foresight report on 'The Future of Food and Farming'.
The event saw Drew Purves, Head of the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, explain how new simulation models of ecosystem structure and function could one day revolutionise how we define and measure ecosystem health, ecosystem services, and ultimately, sustainability.
Dirk Voeste, Head of Sustainability and Product Stewardship at BASF Agricultural Solutions, presented AgBalance, a new methodology applied to measuring sustainability in agriculture. AgBalance uses environmental, economic and social indicators to provide knowledge for fact-based decision making for improving the sustainability of agricultural products and processes.
Environmental NGO input was provided by the Director of WWF’s European Policy Office, Tony Long, who confirmed similarities between industry and WWF programme activities on natural capital and economic activities.
Watch highlights from the ‘How green is my apple?’ event:
View an explanatory video for BASF’s AgBalance methodology:
The December 2011 event was sponsored by BASF and supported by Foresight, the UK Government Office for Science.
