The future of ecolabels

When it comes to the overall environmental impact of food and farming, you've probably seen the statistics.

Food production manufacturing distribution systems are estimated to account for nearly a quarter of carbon emissions. As we zoom out further and consider the wider impacts of the system on all natural resources, numbers get even bigger.

Growing consumer awareness of these impacts has led to a surge in products, services, and businesses that claim to help guide concerned consumers and businesses alike to make better, more informed choices. But how many truly fulfil these objectives, who do they serve, and – importantly - are they driving the kind of change we want to see in agriculture? To answer this question, we first need to consider the two primary approaches taken in this space.

Farm-based approaches

The first group are the farm assurance schemes which are based on assurance of the whole farm rather than individual product. These enable and support changes in farming practice, and often cover a broader range of environmental impacts. Of these schemes, organic is arguably the most established. Having evolved over many decades, the organic system of farming is founded upon principles that encourage farmers to work with ecology, promote positive health, behave fairly, and steward land responsibly for future generations.

Originally referred to as ‘closed farming’ (owing to avoiding the reliance on external inputs) organic farming continues to shun synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides that have long been seen as harmful for humans, animals, and nature. Practices associated with organic farming also aim to build fertility, natural diversity, and resilience, whilst ensuring that livestock are treated as an integral part of a healthy system.

Outcomes-based approaches

Referred to collectively as eco-ratings, the other significant approach is that of product-level schemes which aim to measure environmental impact primarily through use of modelled secondary data to assess the lifecycle of the product. These methodologies, largely based on Life Cycle Analysis (LCAs), can vary significantly. Some use a limited, but manageable, set of impact criteria and tend to focus effort on enabling consumers to compare the impact of products relative to each other, e.g. the climate/carbon impact of carrot versus a steak. Others can be more expansive, factoring in ‘externalities’ associated with different agricultural methods - e.g. the impact of the manufacture, transport and application of fossil fuel-based fertilisers or pesticides on biodiversity, or the impact of farm practice on animal welfare.

Tensions between approaches

The Soil Association has long been concerned about the growing interest in LCA based approaches, the relevance and accuracy of the methodologies used in some approaches to measure the environmental impact, and their inability to capture both the positive and negative externalities of different production methods. An organic carrot may impact very differently from a non-organic carrot and eco-metric-based labelling can struggle to communicate this.

Approaches that consider only a narrow suite of impacts, or which have excessive focus on one metric such as carbon, can beg serious questions around their real-world relevance of some eco-metrics.

Whilst admittedly complex, biodiversity measures are conspicuously absent from some of the leading LCA-based labels being considered for use in the UK. When it comes to humans exceeding planetary boundaries, biodiversity is top of the list. Not factoring for this when scoring products for consumers feels like a significant omission.

Where measures relating to animal welfare are absent there can also be rather perverse outcomes. When we get carbon tunnel vision, a high welfare table bird can receive a lower eco-score than its intensively reared counterpart. Should we direct consumers to the latter bird with its short lifespan and reduced space purely in support of reduced emissions? Not only is this ethically contentious, but it fails to consider the wider, indirect, and less obvious benefits high welfare, extensive, agroecological systems can actually deliver on multiple fronts – including river pollution, public health and waste.

By being product- rather than farm-led their failure to reward best practice at farm level means many LCA-based methodologies risk purely maintaining and further incentivising the status quo of the current intensive food system, rather than supporting a transition to more sustainable, more resilient systems with higher welfare, that are better for human health.

Can we ever be fully metric?

By virtue of their reductionist approach, outcomes-based approaches can still feel limited when we consider the huge complexity of nature-based systems, with all their interactions and complex flow and feedbacks. When viewed through this lens, the benefits of a practice-based ‘umbrella’ approach led by principles that respect complexity and interconnectedness of nature are clear, especially when the science shows just how much more positively these systems of farming net out compared with the alternative.

Even if we could measure much more of this complexity, at what point does measuring at ground-level just become unviable, especially to smaller producers? The wrong suit metrics can also lead to perverse outcomes past farm. If we were to ignore the multiple benefits local food supply chains deliver for environment and people, and purely focus on processing energy per kilogram of beef, we might conclude that smaller, inevitably less ‘efficient’, local abattoirs are underperformers.

Driving a just transition of food systems will be as important as rewarding best-practices. To ensure this, where we do want to measure impacts, we need frameworks which are practical, consistent, fair, and take the ground-level reality into account.

Best of both worlds

With increasingly accessible and more accurate ways of measuring environmental outcomes, there is certainly scope for outcomes-based approaches to play a bigger role in helping make the case for a transition to agroecology.

What if we continued to see the value in communicating practice-led approaches to consumers, whilst at the same time introducing a broad enough set of outcome measures to be meaningful?

Not only could this deliver additional information for consumers, helping increase trust and enabling more nuanced choices without becoming too burdensome, but it could also prove useful as a way to ensure those who want to remunerate farmers for delivering improvement can do so with confidence. Imagine a reduced farm gate premium for organic food with producers being rewarded for the public good they deliver through other green finance mechanisms.

The Soil Association Exchange (SAX) framework is an example of just this approach. With over 1,000 farmers now stepping up to have their farm ground-proofed on soil carbon, water quality, biodiversity, and even social indicators with a growing pot to support those who reach certain benchmarks, SAX is increasingly looking like the way forward. It’s a great example of the kind of hybrid approach much discussed at the recent launch of the CLEAR Consortium’s UK Food Ecolabel methodology review.

For now, we still need to focus energy on supporting the most effective way to drive consumers, procurers, investors and food businesses to reward progress in this space. That will require policymakers, brands and retailers to get behind approaches that accurately represent environmental impacts, and that includes established, proven farmer-led, principle-led approaches like organic, that are already shown to deliver multiple benefits.