Sustainability Impact Assessment Workshop London
Preparation and Implementation
On the 31st of March 2014 the first FOODMETRES case study workshop was held in the Town Hall of the London borough of Lambeth. The aim of the SIA (Sustainability Impact Assessment) activity at the Lambeth workshop was to find out how stakeholders rank the impacts of different types of “short food supply chains” and how they compare against the current baseline scenario, where most of the vegetable supply comes from supermarkets, long food chains and large-scale producers.
The impact scale is what participants (citizens, food activists, entrepreneurs, academic experts) would expect to realistically happen if we were to increase the amount of vegetables supplied through the different types of short food supply chains. The time frame for this to happen was set at the workshop at approximately medium term (= 5 years). The potential impacts are therefore relative to the baseline scenario and can be from very negative (-3) to very positive (+3). There can also be no impact (0) or positive and negative impacts may cancel each other out (0). The activity in Lambeth was specifically concerned with vegetable food supply chains and rated five different short food supply chains, namely: CSA, Urban Gardening (commercial), Urban Gardening (self-supply), direct sale off-farm and direct sale on-farm.
Results
The analysis is based on 17 experts (14 participants, three researchers). This is justified as researchers are also stakeholders and experts, but also because the difference in the researcher and stakeholder average was very small (we have calculated both averages and will later discuss one singular clear difference between researcher and participant rating). This result may already show that the method, despite a small sample size, can produce robust results in terms of impact assessment, which will always remain a “forward looking statement” of potential impacts over a medium-term time frame.
The results showed the highest overall impact rating of 1.98 for the short food supply chain ‘CSA - Community Supported Agriculture’ (Consumer-producer partnerships/cooperatives). This was followed by ‘Urban Gardening for commercial purposes’ with a rating of 1.8 and ‘Urban Gardening for private consumption’ and ‘Direct sales off farm to private consumer’ both with 1.7. The lowest overall rating (1.55) was for the supply chain ‘Direct sales on farm to private consumer’.
All five short food supply chains rated highest on their social aspects of sustainability. The economic and environmental aspects were rated considerably lower with not much difference in economic and environmental impacts. However, there was one notable exception the economic impact of ‘Urban Gardening for private consumption’ was rated a lot lower than the environmental impact (1.05 economic and 1.74 for environmental).
It is also interesting to note that this was the only major difference where the expert average rating differed clearly from the participants’ rating; experts rated the economic impact of ‘Urban Gardening for private consumption’ a 1.6 while participants only rated it 0.87. This large discrepancy of the sustainable impact of this specific food chain is, no doubt, worth further investigation.