Uptake of the Product Environmental Footprint across the MED agrofood regional productive systems to enhance innovation and market value
Next neutralization of all existing environmental certification schemes in EU with 1 single Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) will change Internal Market rules, strategies to consumers & the way of introducing green innovations in industrial supply chain. Agrofood is highly exposed to this change, being affected by an high use of natural resources (energy, water..)& DG-ENV has just provided specific environment benchmarks for a list of agrofood products defining – in the perspective of EU Reg, what is sustainable & not. This is a challenge for MED where agrofood is the 1° economic pillar & is all over a RIS3: if no measures towards PEF-compliance production are spread, MED agrofood sector could suffer a breakdown in competitiveness._x000D_
PEFMED aims to test the PEF-compliance distance-to-target in 9testimonial MED agrofood clusters & supply chains (100 companies) upon a range of products, with the final aim of (1) foster targeted systemic ecoinnovation interventions to green the agrofood sector (also galvanizing the RIS3 goals related to innovation in agrofood industrial production) & 2)raise the market value of PEF-compliant productions, combining PEF standards with endogenous socio economic footprint aspects. 1 pioneering operational methods & 9 LCA-based stress tests report are produced in the 9 pilot agrofood systems, while 1 trasnferability is assured by 1 transnational Community of Practices to embed PEF territory-based method & knowledge vouchering to new 9 clusters.