CRDC has been awarded a grant to enhance cotton's industry-scale data collection and reporting via the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry's National Agriculture Traceability Grants Program.
Under the grant, CRDC aims to cut through the complexity and inconsistency of global sustainability frameworks, and develop a robust sustainability data collection and reporting framework.
The framework will be aligned to major current and emerging market-based sustainability standards, identify cost-effective and robust data sources for indicator gaps, and use the enhanced data to publish industry-scale natural and social capital accounts, set science based targets, and produce annual integrated reports to more clearly communicate the links and trade-offs between natural, social, and financial capital in cotton's farming systems.
The enhanced data generated by the project will improve decision-making for growers (giving them the confidence to adopt practices that create both economic and natural value); our wider stakeholders (giving them better contextual information to inform decisions on buying Australian cotton); and the cotton industry itself (enhancing our ability to monitor progress and deliver impact).
A science-based reporting and target-setting process for natural and social capital may also provide a credible and more robust alternative to simplistic single-score sustainability measures, such as those proposed by the European Union's Product Environmental Footprint.
The project is designed to be scalable and repeatable across all industries - not just cotton. It will provide a proof-of-concept for other Australian agricultural sustainability frameworks. Progress and learnings from the project will be regularly shared with other industries, so we can work towards consistent indicators, credible and robust reporting, and increased awareness and support from our growers.
