Reducing agriculture's environmental impacts through diverse producers

Thesis

The world food system is characterised by millions of diverse producers yet approaches to increase productivity and environmental sustainability that are effective in light of this remain underexplored. Here I present data revealing that the environmental impacts and productivity of different producers are highly variable. I then present evidence that an effective approach to improve outcomes given this heterogeneity would require environmental and productivity monitoring by each producer and communication of this information up supply chains and through to consumers. With colleagues, I develop an environmental science toolkit to enable producers to monitor their environmental impacts and a filetype to represent agri-environmental data which would support producers to communicate their impacts. I then explore how an environmental impact labelling scheme could trigger the creation of this measurement and communication system while also incentivising substantial behavioural change. Overall, this thesis develops, and then starts delivering on, a sustainability and productivity solution for agriculture.

Authors: Poore, JAC

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: sustainability; agriculture; environment
• Subjects: Environmental sciences