Comparing the sustainability of local and global food products in Europe

In the debate surrounding the sustainable future of food, claims like “buy local” are widespread in publications and the media, supported by the discourse that buying “local food” provides ecological, health and socio-economic benefits. Recognising the lack of scientific evidence for this claim, this paper aims to compare the results of sustainability assessments for 14 local and global food products in four sectors within four European countries. Each sector has been analysed independently using sustainability indicators across five dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic, social, health and ethics. In order to determine if local products generally perform better, an outranking analysis was conducted to rank the products relative to their sustainability performance. Outranking is a multi-criteria decision aid method that allows comparison of alternatives based on quantitative and qualitative indicators at different scales. Each product is also characterized by a degree of localness in order to relate sustainability and localness. The results are given in the form of phi flows, which are relative preference scores of one product compared to other ones in the same sector. The rankings showed that global products consistently come last in terms of sustainability, even when the preference functions and weighting of the indicators were varied. The first positions of the rankings were taken either by the most local or an intermediary product. Moreover, detailed rankings at the attribute level showed the relative strengths and weaknesses of each food product along the local-global continuum. It appeared that the strength of local and intermediary products was mainly in health and socio-economic dimensions, particularly aspects of care and links to the territory such as biodiversity, animal welfare, governance or resilience. In relation to global food products, they presented substantial advantages in terms of climate change mitigation and affordability to consumers. This contrasts with the food-miles ecological claim. Thus, we conclude that distance is not the most critical factor in improving sustainability of food products, and that other criteria of localness (identity, governance or size) play a more critical role

Spatial approaches to a circular economy

Rapid urbanization has exerted unsustainable pressures on the environment, and implementing circular economy (CE) in cities has been seen by policy makers as a potential solution for resource scarcity. Scholars have therefore called for an understanding of the spatial aspects of CE that go beyond urban governance strategies, engendering the recent integration of spatial disciplines, such as urban planning and regional economics, into the study of CE. Using the Netherlands as a case study, this research asks the question, "what determines the locations and scales of closing material loops in a circular economy?”, using both quantitative and qualitative spatial analysis methods, and both present- and future-oriented perspectives. Novel data sources on locations of material stocks and flows were used, including waste statistics and material stock maps. Research results were presented in five chapters, each corresponding to an academic paper. Current locations and scales are identified by analyzing the locations of waste reuse clusters in the Netherlands, and future locations and scales are addressed by identifying the optimal locations and service areas of circular construction hubs in Amsterdam. As an overall conclusion, I identified 5 conceptual and methodological tensions that occur when determining locations and scales for closing material loops: urban manufacturing vs urban mining, clusters vs hubs, spaces vs people vs materials, present vs future, and quantitative vs qualitative