There is a rumour going round that one of the major supermarkets has been looking at adding a “biodiversity score” to some of its products. Presumably this would run alongside other environmental accounting schemes like that relating to carbon emissions or, perhaps in due course, a water footprint?
Footprinting is an intriguing concept, and in the past few years it has become synonymous with carbon. To date, some £2 billion worth of goods have a label to show how many carbon emissions were emitted to bring the product to market. Whether that makes a difference at the point of sale is debatable, but at the very least it raises awareness of an environmental issue within the store.
Perhaps more important though, is the label’s use to the business. By footprinting a product, companies can assess where the “carbon hotspots” in their supply chains are. PepsiCo, for instance, calculated the carbon emissions from a bag of crisps (80g), which it then managed to cut by 6g thanks to a number of energy cutting initiatives and a move to 100 per cent British potatoes.
Tesco is another brand keen on carbon labelling its products, including potatoes and orange juice. Originally the plan had been to put labels on all its 70,000 products. Back in 2007, the then chief executive Sir Terry Leahy was not phased by such a challenge. “Many of those people who talk about the need for a carbon currency say it is too complicated to develop; that it will take years,” he said at the time. “However, at Tesco, we believe in action, in overcoming hurdles, in making complex problems simple.”
At the last count, in 2010, about 500 products had been labelled, leaving just 69,500 to go. At the current rate it will take centuries to complete the task. And one of the gases that leads to global warming, carbon dioxide, is one of the “easier” environmental impacts to measure and footprint.
But water is a much more difficult area. “The big difference between carbon dioxide and water is that carbon dioxide is a global concern, whereas water is a very local concern,” explains Rob Lillywhite, a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick.
Indeed, a kilo of carbon dioxide emitted in Israel or Spain has exactly the same impact on the atmosphere and climate change as a kilo of carbon dioxide emitted in New Zealand or Scotland. With water, the impact will depend on the degree of water scarcity in the area it’s taken from, or released in. Timing will also be relevant. Take 100 litres of water from the ground in Suffolk tomorrow to irrigate potatoes and it’ll have a very different impact from taking that quantity in the height of summer when the water table is much lower.
That’s why academics become uneasy when talk turns to ‘carbonising’ water footprints and reflecting them as a single number. Ask them about the possibility of biodiversity footprinting and the feeling turns to trepidation.
“The trouble is defining it,” explains Lillywhite. “Biodiversity is the single most confusing environmental issue. There are probably upwards of 100 indicators that can be used and while a number of biodiversity indices have been developed, I think we’re some way from having an agreed biodiversity footprint.”
Indeed, just what indicators would you use? Bats? Bees? Birds? All of the above and more? “We’re very good at monitoring individual species and elements of biodiversity, but putting it together would be a mammoth task,” says Lillywhite. “I’m not aware of any individual food companies going down this route.”
Indeed even the likes of Unilever, which has 1,600 carbon footprinted products, have admitted that biodiversity is one of the most difficult areas it has to contend with. But just because there isn’t going to be a “spider score” or “beetle bar chart” on packs of bananas any time soon, isn’t a reason to neglect the issue.
Reports have emerged in the past couple of years of attempts to quantify the value of the services provided by biodiversity, the latest of which is the UN-backed TEEB [The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity] which put the contribution of pollination at £120bn globally. DEFRA followed this up with a similar study for the UK, which estimated the value of the wildlife covered in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan and Sites of Special Scientific Interest at £1.5bn. “Our natural environment is essential to achieve long-term sustainable economic growth and we must all know its true value if we are to protect it properly,” said environment minister Lord Henley at the time.
Some 87 of the 115 leading global food crops are reliant on animal pollination, and while the values attributed to the biodiversity involved are often best guesses, lose it and there will undoubtedly be a net cost. There are plenty of schemes already in place to ensure less is lost - cross-compliance and agri-environment schemes, as well as more specific ones like LEAF, the organic certification schemes and Conservation Grade. The latter is a sustainability protocol implemented by farmers geared towards increasing biodiversity. Vitacress has been accredited since 2006.
Steve Rothwell, the company’s production and technical director, says the scheme is a simple step in the right direction, but attempts are underway to find a biodiversity index where farms could be scored.
The Vitacress portfolio includes the brand Steve’s Leaves, which has allowed the company more freedom to market the principles behind its “nature-friendly farms” where 10 per cent of land is dedicated to special biodiversity habitats. In an ideal world Rothwell admits it “would be great to have a biodiversity measure to attribute to farms”, much like has been attempted with carbon and water. But he admits that the industry is nowhere near that.
Nevertheless, retailers and food brands are all too aware of the need to have visible policies that consider biodiversity. Waitrose, for instance, opened a store in November with a “living wall” to promote wildlife around the site and a “bug hotel” in the car park for hibernating insects.
“Companies involved in food production - and particularly those in the world of fruit and veg - are fundamentally reliant on ecosystem services like pollination and are fundamentally reliant on the land and the soil,” says Dan Crossley, a principal sustainability adviser at Forum for the Future. “If they want to flourish in the long term, they need to realise how important biodiversity is.”
But that isn’t the green light to rush in and invest loads of money in biodiversity footprinting just because it’s the next thing to measure, he adds. Environment consultant David Symons of WSP agrees. “Tagging footprinting onto the end of something isn’t always the best way to understand it,” he says. “It might actually be that a careful review of how a company’s value chain interacts with the natural world is a richer and more pragmatic approach.” -
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