Sustainability assessment of short food supply chains (SFSC): developing and testing a rapid assessment tool in one African and three European city regions.

Recent literature demonstrates the contribution of short food supply chains (SFSC) to regional economies and sustainable food systems, and acknowledges their role as drivers for sustainable development. Moreover, different types of SFSC have been supported by urban food policies (UFP) over the few last years and actors from the food chain became part of new institutional settings for urban food policies. However, evidence from the sustainability impact assessment (SIA) of these SFSC in urban contexts is limited. Our paper presents an approach for the development of an SIA framework for different SFSC types. In addition, a practical application of the tool in four metropolitan regions (Berlin, London, Ljubljana and Nairobi) is tested. The conceptual development of the SIA framework is based on an in-depth analysis of existing SIA frameworks and methods for assessing the sustainability of agriculture, food chains and food systems and adapted to the specific needs of analysing SFSC in metropolitan regions. The operational value and utility of the framework and the tool were tested with social and natural scientists and local stakeholders. The assessment results demonstrate that SFSC seems to be more sustainable than the baseline (long global food chains) in the social dimension, but also feature specific strengths and weaknesses concerning their economic and environmental sustainability. This might give an indication for regional adjusted strategies and food chain innovations that improve the sustainability performance may be required. We found the tool useful for framing the dialogue between food chain actors, consumers and policy, because it makes benefits and trade-offs of the chain types operating in an urban-rural context more visible and communicable. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10460-021-10288-w.

Assessing landscape functions with broad-scale environmental data: insights gained from a prototype development for Europe.

We examine the advantages and disadvantages of a methodological framework designed to analyze the poorly understood relationships between the ecosystem properties of large portions of land, and their capacities (stocks) to provide goods and services (flows). These capacities (stocks) are referred to as landscape functions. The core of our assessment is a set of expert- and literature-driven binary links, expressing whether specific land uses or other environmental properties have a supportive or neutral role for given landscape functions. The binary links were applied to the environmental properties of 581 administrative units of Europe with widely differing environmental conditions and this resulted in a spatially explicit landscape function assessment. To check under what circumstances the binary links are able to replace complex interrelations, we compared the landscape function maps with independently generated continent-wide assessments (maps of ecosystem services or environmental parameters/indicators). This rigorous testing revealed that for 9 out of 15 functions the straightforward binary links work satisfactorily and generate plausible geographical patterns. This conclusion holds primarily for production functions. The sensitivity of the nine landscape functions to changes in land use was assessed with four land use scenarios (IPCC SRES). It was found that most European regions maintain their capacity to provide the selected services under any of the four scenarios, although in some cases at other locations within the region. At the proposed continental scale, the selected input parameters are thus valid proxies which can be used to assess the mid-term potential of landscapes to provide goods and services.