Here in New Zealand it is, of course, autumn / fall, so some of the things that we associate with Easter in the Northern hemisphere are different. Nelson at least has been enjoying some pleasant weather, so it was easy to be outside and enjoying the great surroundings here.
As you know, we recently released our Beef Carbon Footprint Guideline. This was a collaboration between GRSB members and our Science advisory committee, with support from Blonk Consultants. Funding came from McDonalds and DSM, and the benefits are for all of our members.
This was the first of our projects related specifically to one of our Goals (Climate), and it has shown the value of a collaborative approach. I know that there are several collaborative projects between members, and would be keen to be able to profile these better in this newsletter and in our webinar series. We are, of course, looking for more projects related to each of our goals and to communications.
We are keen to collaborate on projects where adoption of either practices or technologies is being measured against performance to demonstrate their effectiveness in any of the goal areas. A few possible themes occur to me, though I should add it is not in my hands to make final decisions about what projects should be pursued. They will be put to the Goals working groups and ultimately approved by the board.
In the area of animal welfare, we would like to see examples of projects that can demonstrate measurement of welfare indicators, whether those are animal based or resource based.
I recently had a conversation with one of our members about research into pain mitigation, and the lasting impact that can have on cattle, not just in the immediate post procedure phase but in terms of response to stressful events throughout the animal’s life.
There are also research projects into causes and solutions of calf mortality, impact of welfare on productivity and others. There will also be a need for projects that can disseminate learnings between different regions, as some practices, such as pain mitigation, are much more widely adopted (and indeed available) in some areas than others.
Under the Climate goal, we are going to be faced with a challenge when it comes to gathering baseline information from some countries. This is why the Carbon Footprint Guideline was developed. We know that some of our national roundtable members will need assistance to undertake this work.
Another area which needs focus is carbon sequestration, deliberately not included in the guide because there are still methodological challenges as to how to measure and account for sequestration, despite its very clear significance to the beef industry.
As you may have heard the Dairy industry has been working on this through their C-Sequ project and have recently undertaken some pilot studies, and are planning on releasing the report in the third quarter of the year. GHG protocols are also looking at this and are methodologically not too far from C-sequ as I understand from Brian Lindsay.
Once those two pieces of work are available, I would expect our members to be keen to undertake some trials with them, which would be a suitable project for our Climate working group and science advisory committee.
There are also numerous opportunities to work on adoption of practical measures, such as grazing management plans, silvopastoral projects and others in a variety of member countries.
Grazing management strategies and silvopastoralism would also contribute to nature positive production, and we could, of course, do projects that cover any or all of the goals.
In light of recent proposed EU legislation to combat deforestation, there will certainly be a need for projects that address whole chain traceability. This will be a subject of a forthcoming webinar, but I would like to hand over to Josefina here to talk about the work she has been doing with the Roundtable for Responsible Leather (with GRSB member Textile Exchange) on Impact Incentives. This is a mechanism that GRSB and our members could use:
The Leather Impact Accelerator (LIA) is a framework that sets existing industry tools into a coherent package and enables leather supply chain members – from farmers to retailers – to contribute to a more responsible leather supply chain.
Impact Incentives (also known as credit trading or Book & Claim) are the certificates that are traded in support of a sustainability claim (such as Deforestation and Conversion Free and Animal Welfare).
The way that LIA Impact Incentives work is quite simple: farms that are certified to a standard or program that meets the LIA Animal Welfare benchmark or is verified DCF will be able to sell Incentives for their volume of output; brands can then purchase these Incentives to balance out their use of these output materials, or to meet their CSR goals. The farms selling the Incentives may or may not be in the supply chain of the brands, as the Incentive trading system does not address traceability. While this means that brands may not make any content claims on their products, they can by-pass the cost and complexity of long or opaque supply chains in order to deliver impact at the farm level, quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, they may still make claims about their support for best practices.
GRSB is analyzing options to be part of this program and generate Beef Impact Incentives. One of the alternatives is through field verification of compliance with standards/programs of the National Round Tables.
(For more information you can contact josefina.eisele@grsbeef.org)
