Connecting sustainability performance to the global goals for coffee and cotton

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The need for common and measurable metrics
The challenge
The solution
Supporting producers
An innovative approach
How ISEAL members can become involved

Introduction

About the project

Project title: The Delta Project: Bridging the Gap in Measuring Real-Time Sustainability Performance

Lead organisation: Better Cotton Initiative

Partners: Global Coffee Platform, International Coffee organisation, International Cotton Advisory Committee Expert Panel on Social, Environmental and Economic Performance of Cotton Production

Duration: February 2019 - June 2021

The need for common and measurable metrics

There are many sustainability standards and public-sector initiatives that promote sustainability within commodity sectors. Despite their proliferation, however, important gaps remain, which challenge the collective ability of these programs to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on a global scale.

Private companies—especially those that market directly to consumers—are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of their sourcing practices. While the current approach of assessing product life cycles can help to highlight environmental improvements, it fails to take into account the social or economic impacts of responsible sourcing decisions. Companies need measurable metrics and tools to assess and report on their progress toward publicly communicated sustainability commitments.

The challenge

There are similarly no mechanisms within commodity sectors to allow for the comparison of results, no guiding principles to ensure that measured indicators align with the SDGs, and no methods for aggregating the performance of multiple companies within a sector to draw a more accurate picture of how a sector is contributing to national and global sustainability.

Finally, even as agricultural sustainability standards and initiatives become increasingly data driven, smallholder farmers—who are at the core of these efforts—lack consistent, timely access to the data that they are generating. For example, coffee and cotton farmers provide governments, researchers, and other stakeholders with farm-performance and socio-economic data, and yet the analyses that result from this information are rarely shared with the farmers.

The solution

To bridge these gaps, the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) and the Global Coffee Platform (GCP) have created the Delta Project, which aims to build a common framework for sustainability reporting that is linked to SDG targets. Focusing on the coffee and cotton sectors, the framework will measure sustainability improvements and demonstrate their connection to company sourcing practices and governmental monitoring. BCI and GCP will rely on broad stakeholder consultation, including input from members of the International Coffee Organization and the International Cotton Advisory Committee.

The framework will feature a common set of environmental, social, and economic indicators to measure sustainability across both of these commodity sectors, though the number of indicators will be limited to ensure that the framework remains manageable for companies and governments. The project will also provide examples of good and bad practices; tools and information to facilitate the framework’s adoption; and with recommendations on how companies can communicate sustainability information to their customers.

Supporting producers

Additionally, farmers will be able to use the framework to track their own progress and compare their efforts to others in similar production contexts. The sustainability data they generate will be used to demonstrate that financing and technical assistance can increase revenue and mitigate default risks by boosting productivity, increasing crop quality, and making farms more resilient. The results are expected to improve the kind of support farmers receive in the future, including better financing terms and more favorable government policies that promote sustainability in the agricultural sector. The project will be field-tested among cotton and coffee farmers in South Africa and Vietnam.

An innovative approach

The Delta Project has the potential to reimagine the ways that sustainability performance is assessed and reported. By determining how well SDG targets are being met, the framework will enable better scrutiny of large-scale change over time. It will also improve the way that improvements are measured within commodity sectors, encouraging longer-term strategic thinking.

Standardizing a framework and making it adaptable to a range of commodities will also foster the development of a common language for sustainability, and make it easier to collect and compare data. The availability of structured data will benefit all stakeholders, including farmers, service providers, retailers, governments, donors, NGOs, and academia. The data can then be deployed to drive sustainability improvements among farmers and increase their efficiency, as well as to improve the services that are provided to them. It can also help companies make credible sourcing claims to meet their customers’ legal and transparency requirements, and allow consumers to make better-informed decisions about the products they buy.

How ISEAL members can become involved

While the Delta Project currently focuses on cotton and coffee, it is being designed to allow for future expansion, extending its potential application to cocoa, soy, palm oil, sugar, and other commodity sectors in which ISEAL members work. The standardization and digitization of data related to sustainability indicators will facilitate processing, analysis, and reporting across sectors, as well as make it easier for ISEAL members to quantify their impacts and assess how their standards stack up against the SDGs. Finally, the project will also help them take a leading role in framing and directing the global sustainability discussion.

At project’s end, the partners will produce a report that covers lessons learned from their field-testing work, assesses the framework’s positive and negative outcomes, and makes recommendations for improvement. It will also include specific stories that illustrate tangible impacts of the framework. All of this information will be disseminated via conferences, social media, articles, and other communication channels.

Sustainability Initiatives and Frameworks | Delta Framework

This desk research is an output from the Delta Framework, an ISEAL Innovations Fund supported project that is developing a cross-commodity framework for sustainability monitoring and reporting.

Sustainability Initiatives and Frameworks | Delta Framework10.8 MB

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