Text Mining National Commitments towards Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Use

Stella D. Juventia, Sarah K. Jones, Marie-Angélique Laporte, Roseline Remans, Chiara Villani and Natalia Estrada-Carmona
Additional contact information
Stella D. Juventia: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Parc Scientifique Agropolis II, 34397 Montpellier, France
Sarah K. Jones: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Parc Scientifique Agropolis II, 34397 Montpellier, France
Marie-Angélique Laporte: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Parc Scientifique Agropolis II, 34397 Montpellier, France
Roseline Remans: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Via del Tre Denari, 472/a, 00054 Maccarese (Fiumicino), Italy
Chiara Villani: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Via del Tre Denari, 472/a, 00054 Maccarese (Fiumicino), Italy
Natalia Estrada-Carmona: The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Parc Scientifique Agropolis II, 34397 Montpellier, France

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: Capturing countries’ commitments for measuring and monitoring progress towards certain goals, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), remains underexplored. The Agrobiodiversity Index bridges this gap by using text mining techniques to quantify countries’ commitments towards safeguarding and using agrobiodiversity for healthy diets, sustainable agriculture, and effective genetic resource management. The Index extracts potentially relevant sections of official documents, followed by manual sifting and scoring to identify agrobiodiversity-related commitments and assign scores. Our aim is to present the text mining methodology used in the Agrobiodiversity Index and the calculated commitments scores for nine countries while identifying methodological improvements to strengthen it. Our results reveal that levels of commitment towards using and protecting agrobiodiversity vary between countries, with most showing the strongest commitments to enhancing agrobiodiversity for genetic resource management followed by healthy diets. No commitments were found in any country related to some specific themes including varietal diversity, seed diversity, and functional diversity. The revised text mining methodology can be used for benchmarking, learning, and improving policies to enable conservation and sustainable use of agrobiodiversity. This low-cost, rapid, remotely applicable approach to capture and analyse policy commitments can be readily applied for tracking progress towards meeting other sustainability objectives.

Keywords: target monitoring; public policy; healthy diets; genetic resources; sustainable agriculture; agricultural biodiversity; artificial intelligence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/2/715/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/2/715/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:2:p:715-:d:310514

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().