The Information Challenge for Sustainable Consumption and Production

Organisation :
ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, ETH Zurich, Global Trade Alert, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
The Information Challenge for Sustainable Consumption Production event

On 22 June 2022 15:00 - 16:30 (CET), the United Nations Environment Programme, ETH Zurich, Global Trade Alert and ZHAW hosted online the latest of a series of stakeholder expert exchanges as part of the project “Digital Infrastructure for Sustainable Consumption and Production” (DISCAP). This meeting was designed as a ‘reality check’, to understand the information problems experienced by stakeholders and the practical challenges building a new transparency mechanism for sustainable consumption and production.

The moderated discussion of multi-stakeholders focused on their pain points in incorporating environmental considerations into value chain operations, investment decisions, consumption, and policy making, in particular the information aspect of the challenge. Particular examples were drawn from the agri-food value chain. This was followed by an exchange of speakers to assess the effectiveness of transparency mechanisms of climate, environment and economic governance and related data ecosystems in tackling those challenges. Recapping expert exchanges of environmental monitoring, value chain traceability and green economy policy transparency that took place in March and April of 2022, the organizers facilitated the participants to translate the information pain into questions of data systems. The participants were encouraged to think beyond the existing centralized transparency mechanisms and elaborate if the rising data solutions in its decentralized form are relevant for the daily information pain of stakeholders.

Program
Outcomes

The Information Challenge for Sustainable Consumption and Production

15:00 - 15:10 Welcome and introduction
Opening words from Yaxuan Chen head of project UNEP
15:10 - 15:40 Identifying the information pain

There are challenges to transform the value chain, investment, consumption and the economic governance towards sustainability, despite the ambition.

Using the agri-food sector as an example. Daily pains exist for stakeholders. How can we be better informed about the impact of the increasing planetary crises and the resulting disruption to production, logistics and regulatory uncertainties? How can we assess the risks and impact of investments with limited visibility and accessibility to agricultural entrepreneurs in rural areas? How can we find out and verify the food information as advertised? What goods, services and knowledge are needed for the green economic transformation and how can we facilitate access to them? These problems are information associated, as the critical information for answering these questions is either missing or we lack the capacity to process it.

Speakers will deliberate about the information challenge using practical examples in their work and how have those challenges been addressed.

15:40 - 16:20 Translating information pain points into questions of data science and transparency mechanism

In a traditional setting, for decades, the information flow in climate, nature and economic governance starts with a process of national information collection and disclosure by governments or by the professional network. This is followed with processes of global data coordination, harmonization and integration that are usually mandated to an international organization. Along the years, additional monitoring schemes have been established with different methodologies or aims to answer research questions that are not fully addressed in the mandate of international organizations. Together with business intelligence suppliers, at least three monitoring domains have emerged to meet demands for information: the provision of data offering insights into the environment, economic activities and public policies.

This session will start by inviting speakers to share their preferred information sources and consider what ideal transparency tools should look like. It will be followed by a brief recap from exchanges with experts of the three monitoring areas that took place in March/April. Intervention from experts on the role of data systems to address common challenges of the monitoring areas will be expected. The discussion will touch on how new techniques for collecting, pooling and analyzing different types of data that have matured in recent years can fulfill the need of stakeholders to have access to comprehensive information and the capacity to process the information at ease. Building on an understanding of technical feasibility and the political reality, questions of what future transparency mechanisms should be developed to serve the practical needs of stakeholders will be raised for discussion.

Three presentations to facilitate the discussion (5 minutes each)

  • Picturing the information flow of transparency mechanisms and recapping the three expert exchanges (Yaxuan Chen)
  • Connecting three data systems – one use case demonstration (Kurt Stockinger)
  • Ideal transparency tools for green economy policy making and implementation (Simon Evenett)

16:20 - 16:30 Conclusions

Information pain points:

The meeting revealed a vital gap between the data supply and stakeholder demand for information relating to sustainable consumption and production. In March and April, expert groups with monitoring expertise revealed a rapidly growing body of data, but a low level of uptake. Yet, on June 22nd , stakeholders described a general desire to act on sustainable consumption and production, but a lack of actionable and available data that fits specific decision-making contexts. Some pain points experienced among stakeholder groups are summarized below:

Start-ups and venture capital (Brandon Day) Discrepancy in defining terms like ‘sustainable’ and ‘regenerative’; Lack of information available to start-ups; Start-ups tend to prioritize revenue, partners and customers - not sustainability
Investors (Vian Sharif) Much better data available for large, publicly owned businesses than smaller businesses; Different types of data needed for different investments; Lack of transparency over how investors use data
Consumers (Oliver Bealby-Wright) Deliberate and non-deliberate greenwashing; Lack of attention to behavior revealing how consumers process transparency data (e.g. information overload); Information not enough for ‘green premium’
Agri-food value chains (Sener Celik) Complex ownership of data between farmers and machinery producers; Primary farm data sharing limited due to competitivity
Government actors (Simon Evenett) Inadequate funding means data generation is problem-driven and short-term; Limited data connecting policies with outcomes

 

Translating information pain points into questions of data science and transparency mechanism:

In the second half of the session, experts weighed in on the technological and practical challenges associated with addressing the information pain points raised by stakeholders. This exercise was designed to identify key questions for solution-oriented discussions on June 30 th . Four experts (Thomas Streinz, Fulai Sheng, Kurt Stockinger and Simon Evenett) each offered their own interpretations of the challenges, drawing from their experience in their own domains. A key finding was that a multi-disciplinary solution for a transparency mechanism is needed.

  • What data is currently not generated, but must be generated?
  • Why is generated data not reaching the stakeholders that require this data for sustainable consumption and production?
  • When the right data is available for stakeholders, why is it not leading to effective action?
  • How can the owners of data be incentivised to share critical data for sustainable consumption and production?
  • How can data standards be implemented to ensure data is verifiable and of a high quality?
  • From a data science perspective, how can we design a system that connects heterogenous types of data (policy data, environment data, supply chain data) to reveal actionable insights for sustainable consumption and production?