International: Integrating globally-recognised sustainability metrics for tropical perennial crops in a one-stop shop Cool Farm Tool

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We will develop a fully integrated environmental decision support tool for tropical perennial crops and deliver a full technical specification for inclusion into the online, and freely available Cool Farm Tool. The Cool Farm Tool is owned by the Cool Farm Alliance (CFA) who will partner on this project. It is a business-led initiative to assess and improve the sustainability of agriculture-based supply chains. It is funded via a membership model, with membership consisting of over 50 companies including for example major multinationals such as Unilever, PepsiCo, Heineken, Danone, Nestle, Marks and Spencer, and Tesco. Members pay to maintain the tool and deploy at scale in their supply chains but it is a core principle of the Alliance that the tool is and will always be free-to-use for farmers. The CFT itself is a science-based decision support tool designed for use by farmers at farm scale. It has benefitted from significant NERC Discovery and Innovation funding in the past and as a result includes a growing suite of metrics for crop and livestock systems in an expanding set of geographic locations (over 100 countries). Several case studies have shown the impact that has been derived using the tool, for example PepsiCo's "50-in-5" (http://pepsico.co.uk/live/story/celebrating-sustainable-farming) and egg production in North America resulting in a 25% reduction in the carbon footprint from primary production (Vetter et al 2018). Tropical perennial crops are of huge importance to global food supply chains and typically have high dependence on smallholder farmers in DAC countries where decision-support has been hindered less scientific evidence and the focus of researchers in temperate regions. This project build on numerous previous NERC and Wellcome Trust outputs and exploits established successful relationships between the project partners to ensure delivery. We will develop modules based around the existing CFT methods to allow a one-stop shop assessment tool for carbon and water footprinting and biodiversity impacts of farm practice in tropical perennials. Through partnership with the Cool Farm Alliance and the £5.4M Wellcome Trust funded SHEFS project we will ensure delivery of a tool which has practical value to farmers and supply chains. This business-led, science-based, and farmer-focused project will thereby provide robust metrics which will allow farmers to engage and demonstrate their positive actions for sustainability into international supply chains, and the businesses to identify good practices to embed in their sustainable sourcing strategies. The possibility to combine, in a single decision support tool, the multiple impacts of farm practices is attractive for many reasons, not least being that it will reduce the current burden on farmers to conduct multiple assessments of dubious value on multiple impacts for multiple buyers.