STANDARDS AND INDICATORS TO ASSESS SUSTAINABILITY: THE RELEVANCE OF METRICS AND INVENTORIES

Abstract

The global wine industry has recognized the benefits of embracing a more sustainable approach to be more competitive and resilient. However, evaluation of complex winegrowing systems and assessment of their sustainability performance remains a difficult task. In this paper, we use the Douro wine region in Portugal as a case study to test different benchmarking approaches to assess sustainability performance. Our findings revealed a greater sustainability of social and environmental components of the Douro vineyard farms, but the economic pillar shows weaknesses. We may assume that the Douro demands a strategy to improve its economic stability, resilience and adaptability to face future challenges (more adverse climate conditions, labour shortage, and increased costs). This work also emphasizes the need of the wine sector to increase and improve research on sustainability issues and evaluation frameworks to assess it, having always in consideration the context where the winegrowing system operates.