Agriculture has a major impact on the planet. The sector currently accounts for almost a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, 70 per cent of fresh water use and three-quarters of deforestation. Agriculture’s impact is set to increase over coming decades, with experts suggesting that a 60 per cent increase in global food production will be required to meet the demands of our growing populations and changing diets.

Clarmondial AG and Wageningen Environmental Research (WEnR), supported by EIT Climate-KIC’s Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) Booster, have joined forces on a new initiative to promote transparency and science-based approaches to monitoring environmental impacts in agricultural supply chains.

EIRA (Environmental Impact Reporting for Agriculture) is a new reporting initiative designed to boost environmental stewardship across complex agricultural supply chains by aggregating and synthesizing key environmental impact metrics for agriculture. EIRA is intended to result in a new, low-cost, science-based tool to help financiers and agri-businesses benchmark and compare their environmental impact performance to inform better decision-making, to aggregate existing data sources, and to highlight critical research gaps.

While some agriculture-related information is being collected and reported, it remains challenging for financiers and agri-businesses to monitor and act on environmental sustainability, in particular where there is a need to evaluate impact across companies, sub-sectors and geographies. The first phase of EIRA has confirmed this gap as well as strong interest in environmental metrics among key stakeholders including banks, non-bank financing companies and agri-businesses. EIRA seeks to collaboratively address this gap, in part to help the sector attract additional, well- priced funding from the sustainable and impact investing community.

Tanja Havemann, co-Founder and director of Clarmondial, said: “EIRA was initiated in response to the challenge of relatively poor integration of scientific information on environmental impact metrics in financial decision making. We urgently need robust, reliable and transparent environmental impact reporting and aggregation methods, so that the finance community can properly integrate environmental impacts into decision making, and to help the agricultural sector attract more investment.”

Peter Kuikman, senior research and project leader at Wageningen Research (WEnR Alterra) said: “EIRA seeks to build a more consistent approach for mobilizing information from the agriculture sector. By enabling increased transparency and comparability, the EIRA tool will help to promote more environmentally sustainable agricultural practices and create transparency on current methods. This may also highlight ‘science gaps’ where increased investments need to be considered to ensure better governance.”

Pan Pan, flagship manager of CSA Booster and deputy director of EIT Climate-KIC’s Sustainable Land Use theme said:“Investors need robust, consistent, science-driven information to accelerate and de-risk the new investment urgently needed to boost food security, climate-resilience and agricultural productivity across the sector. EIRA will harness science-based approaches to mobilize more funding for climate-smart agriculture.”