Fundación Global Nature challenged students from the three different academic disciplines of the Universidad Europea de Madrid to answer this question:How could biodiversity become relevant for business and consumers?
More specific, the following issues were addressed:
- 1. First, students of Market Research described the knwoledge, attitude and perception towards the impact of the agrifood industry in the environment.
- 2. Then a second group of students worked together in Creativity classes to identify preconceived concepts and ideas about food and biodiversity and later on, they imagined a universal concept to raise awareness.
- 3. Finally, a third group of Film Direction students translated the concept into sound and images to produce a short video.
What did the students find out?
- The agrifood sector shall learn to communicate transparently their environmental performance
- Consumers do not identify farming as a polluting activity and, therefore, ecolabels are not demanded. That is why we cannot ask consumers to help solving a problem that they are not aware of or know little about it.
- The willingness of consumers to pay more is related to HEALTH, not to ENVIRONMENT.
When the students presented these results to the Project team, they invited them to present it to the Sustainable Procurement Working Group, a networking space for professionals of the agrifood sector. According to a survey conducted by this Working Group (answered by 51 technicians of Spanish agrifood companies), environmental aspects are considered more important than social or economic issues of their Sustainability policies. Among the environmental challenges, aspects such as energy, environmental footprints and waste are more attractive for companies while biodiversity and other aspects (relatively complex to communicate) like rural development, are pushed into the background.
Professionals of the working group (including Communication agencies, largest food processing companies, staff, competent authorities dealing with farming and environmental issues, and NGOs) listened to the conclusions of the students that created
#CoolGreen, an initiative that promotes responsible and healthy consumption through strategies such as sensory marketing. "We want to bring sustainable products out of the closet that today have no visibility," they said. The good news is that this cooperation resulted in an award from the European University.
An
outcome document summarizes the results in the form of conclusions and recommendations.
Will the challenge "How biodiversity could become relevant for business and consumers" be answered?
SOURCE: Fundación Global Nature, June 2019