The Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) has published the first peer-reviewed paper on the SMART (Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment RouTine) approach in the journal "Sustainability". The paper analyses trade-offs and synergies between sustainability themes and dimensions using SMART. Additionally, it provides a detailed description of the SMART farm tool and a full list of the indicators. With this paper, FiBL ensures full transparency about the approach and encourages fellow researchers and other stakeholders to make use of SMART to benchmark and compare the sustainability performance of farms.
The SMART farm tool is based on the SAFA guidelines by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It allows assessing the sustainability of single farms and groups of farms comprehensively across the environmental, social and economic dimension. Additionally, SMART includes the governance dimension, which looks at whether farm management is adequately facilitating the achievement of sustainability goals. With 300 indicators and a standardised, science-based procedure for assessment, SMART ensures a transparent assessment focussing on the main levers that drive the achievement of 58 sustainability goals.
Further information
Links
- mdpi.com: Abstract and paper in HTML and PDF
- orgprints.org: Paper in the Organic Eprints Archive