Increasingly, in our industry, there has been a face-off between data optimists and data pessimists - those who believe we can get good, specific data to assess impacts and those who think that global averages are as good as it’s likely to get.
This debate has intensified of late, not just by the Norwegian Consumer Authority’s ruling on the use of average data on product labels, but also by policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic working on due diligence legislation and the European Union’s long-awaited Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) tool.
There is, and has long been, data available for cotton farming, but often only for some areas and at variable costs. But the situation seems to be improving with both real and simulated data.
