Economic, Environmental and Social Sustainability Indicators of the Australian Cotton Industry

Abstract

Expectations for industries to manage resources in a sustainable manner raise the question of how industries can demonstrate their sustainability credentials. This thesis reviews the question of sustainability monitoring and reporting in relation to the Australian cotton industry. Principals of sustainability reporting in business and agriculture were reviewed. A set of sustainability indicators has been developed and economic, environmental and social data compiled. A specific analysis of the cotton industry’s environmental management system, the Cotton Best Management Practices program was completed to investigate its potential to track and report farm management practice change over a 10 year period. Key economic sustainability indicators include (Chapter 3): production area, yield, quality, gross value, profitability and regional economic activity. Very good economic data is available about the cotton industry, although it is not readily accessible for all stakeholders. Key environmental sustainability indicators (Chapter 4) include soil, water, pesticide and transgenic crop trait stewardship, biodiversity and greenhouse emissions. The cotton industry has good data sets available from case studies and research reports for environmental indicators. However, these generally give a ‘point in time’ picture rather than a long term trend and are rarely industry wide. They are also often associated with the best producers, rather than the “average” producer. There are very few data sets that can be used to track changes over long periods of time. The BMP analysis showed it has great potential for monitoring long term trends, which should be supplemented with some targeted and repeated surveys as needed. Key social sustainability indicators (Chapter 5) include education levels, demographics, employment, health, community attitudes, social capital, research and development and compliance with the law. There exists reasonable data relating to social indicators. This was an unexpected finding as the gathering of social data is usually considered difficult for sustainability reporting. A major gap is employment data, which is not well quantified either for farms or the local service industries. The analysis of the Cotton Best Management Practices (BMP) program farm practice audit criteria for the 10 years between 1999 and 2008 shows that it is possible to identify and quantify how cotton growers have implemented changes to a wide range of their farm management practices (Chapter 6).