Creating a Baseline Assessment for Beef Sustainability
5th December 2017
The Beef Working Group envision that the beef sector is recognised for delivering measurable positive impacts and continuous improvement towards key sustainability priorities. We started our journey as a group by creating a baseline assessment to holistically identify all the indicators that could be considered to contribute to Beef sustainability.
The Baseline Beef Sustainability Assessment
In 2017 we launched 6 pilot programmes in 6 countries: Germany, Poland, UK, Ireland, Italy and France, with the ethos being “learning by doing”. Since collaboration with national schemes is key to scale our efforts and create impact, these pilot programmes kicked off by benchmarking our baseline beef sustainability assessment against national schemes to identify overlaps and opportunities.
As a next step and to enable us to focus our efforts on the issues that matter most in each country, in the second half of 2017 each pilot programme conducted a materiality analysis. As part of this analysis, each country engaged multiple stakeholders and used the baseline assessment topics as a starting point. Last week, the result of these materiality analyses was shared. Whilst each region took slightly different approaches to the materiality assessments, there were clear communalities in terms of high risk topics across all countries.
Prioritising for 2018
In 2018, we will define as a group some SAI Platform Beef Group common issues to prioritise as well as additional national priorities through the pilot programmes. We will find how best to improve the current status and create positive impacts towards these issues on the ground, how to mobilise change agents at national and at European level and which tools can support the process.
