Increasingly environmentally and socially aware consumers are looking to make informed choices on where their food comes from and how it is produced. Consequently, retailers, producers’ organisations, and other stakeholders in food production systems are looking to measure their sustainability credentials, make improvements to their practices and then communicate that information to their customers.

Incentives to reduce environmental footprints, especially carbon emissions, are also being driven by certification bodies, pressure groups, and at a high government level, with international targets to become “Net Zero” by 2050. However, to achieve these sustainability goals, a high level of transparency and traceability is required throughout the value chain, which can sometimes cause concerns over intellectual property rights and can be open to abuse. What information is included and how it is measured is subject to debate in academic circles. This has led to a void in terms of standardised reporting and companies have often manipulated environmental credentials as a marketing tool.

Figure 3: Regional climate change impacts in Europe (source EC)

The EU has introduced the Product Environmental Category Rules (PEFCR) which are the rules which should be applied to measuring the environmental footprint of EU products and have been developed in an effort to harmonise environmental footprinting (Ojala et al 2016). The EU is currently developing PEFCR for major product categories including food and feed (European Commission, 2018a) (See https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/smgp/ for context and comprehensive background). In addition, major aquaculture certifiers demand a minimum level of responsible and sustainable practices across a series of different categories. Certification can provide confidence to retailers that they are sourcing responsibly, where regulation is weak or poorly enforced, which enables them to communicate those sustainability credentials to their customers.