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Large sections of the German society are able to buy and consume meat on a daily basis due to progress in the agri-food sector. However, the way meat is produced, traded and consumed increasingly has become an issue that is controversially discussed by the media, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), lobbyists, the industry itself and consumers – often with a negative connotation. The meat industry reacts to this. By creating information campaigns and animal welfare initiatives it aims to stress that it is going to take its corporate social responsibilities (CSR) for consumers and animal welfare seriously. But, the industry’s actions are still criticised as being not sufficient to improve animal welfare levels significantly. Much of this criticism can be observed in online news portals, where articles about the issue get published and commented by readers. This makes online portals a valuable source for information that is to be tapped in this study. It aims to better understand the multifaceted discussions concerning animal welfare initiatives in online portals. By applying qualitative content analysis and web mining techniques to a sample of documents taken from three major German news sites it can be shown that online discussions refer to various aspects of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Findings also indicate that the discussions are framed by financial aspects.
The implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the conservation and protection of nature are among the greatest challenges facing urban regions. There are few approaches so far that link the SDGs to natural diversity and related ecosystem services at the local level and track them in terms of increasing sustainable development at the local level. We want to close this gap by developing a set of indicators that capture ecosystem services in the sense of the SDGs and which are based on data that are freely available throughout Germany and Europe. Based on 10 SDGs and 35 SDG indicators, we are developing an ecosystem service and biodiversity-related indicator set for the evaluation of sustainable development in urban areas. We further show that it is possible to close many of the data gaps between SDGs and locally collected data mentioned in the literature and to translate the universal SDGs to the local level. Our example develops this set of indicators for the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg metropolitan area in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, which comprises both rural and densely populated settlements. This set of indicators can also help improve communication and plan sustainable development by increasing transparency in local sustainability, implementing a visible sustainability monitoring system, and strengthening the collaboration between local stakeholders.
In January 2015, German trade and industry announced to support the national animal welfare initiative "Initiative Tierwohl" (ITW) which stands for a more sustainable and animal-friendly meat production. A web content analysis shows that the ITW initiative has been widely picked up and discussed by online media and that user comments are quite heterogeneous. The current study identifies different types of consumers through factor and cluster analysis and is based on an online survey as well as face-to-face interviews. According to our results, the identified consumer groups demonstrate a rather passive comment behaviour on the internet. In fact, the internet was hardly mentioned as an information source for meat production; consumers more frequently referred to brochures, leaflets and personal contacts with sales personnel.