Integrating Life Cycle and Impact Assessments to Map Food's Cumulative Environmental Footprint

Abstract

Feeding a growing, increasingly affluent population while limiting environmental pressures of food production is a central challenge for society. Understanding the location and magnitude of food production is key to addressing this challenge because pressures vary substantially across food production types. Applying data and models from life cycle assessment with the methodologies for mapping cumulative environmental impacts of human activities (hereafter cumulative impact mapping) provides a powerful approach to spatially map the cumulative environmental pressure of food production in a way that is consistent and comprehensive across food types. However, these methodologies have yet to be combined. By synthesizing life cycle assessment and cumulative impact mapping methodologies, we provide guidance for comprehensively and cumulatively mapping the environmental pressures (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, spatial occupancy, and freshwater use) associated with food production systems. This spatial approach enables quantification of current and potential future environmental pressures, which is needed for decision makers to create more sustainable food policies and practices. ll

Environmental footprints of farmed chicken and salmon bridge the land and sea

“…For chickens, such an approach may provide innovative solutions to pollution concerns (soil, water, air, and noise) that can impact organism, worker, and environmental health 39,40 . Additional work is urgently needed to translate CPI into assessments of on-the-ground environmental impacts on nature and people 42,43 to better account for trade-offs.…”

“…Future work should explore the implications of the relative magnitude of individual pressures on environmental outcomes, as we consider all pressures in this analysis to be of equal importance. This is particularly important given that the realized impacts from CPI may be more reliant on spatial context than pressure magnitude due to underlying environmental and social vulnerabilities 43 . We urge researchers, consumers, and policy makers to shift the thinking around fed animal production as being "terrestrial" and "aquatic", but rather as fitting on a continuum, exhibiting both reliance and pressure on a huge number of environments and production systems.…”

A Review of Environmental Life Cycle Assessments of Diets: Plant-Based Solutions Are Truly Sustainable, even in the Form of Fast Foods

“…One must also consider the distinction between collective and local impacts. An intensive cattle farm may have lower environmental impacts per cow than a pasture-based farm, but when assessed spatially it has significantly higher local emissions and water demand per area of land [71]. Low production systems might look promising in terms of local cumulative environmental pressures but could result in a larger overall footprint.…”

Circular utilization of urban tree waste contributes to the mitigation of climate change and eutrophication

“…7,[17][18][19][20][21] LCA is a standardized and widely accepted tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product or a service throughout its life cycle. 17,[22][23][24][25][26] To explore the potential environmental benefits, counterfactual systems for alternative end-of-life cases were considered. (e.g., landfill, incineration, and mulch represent current treatment methods of urban tree waste).…”