Environmental impacts of cultured meat: alternative production scenarios

Cultured meat is produced by culturing animal muscle tissue in a laboratory without growing the whole animals. Its development is currently in a research stage. An earlier study showed that cultured meat production could potentially have substantially lower greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water use compared to conventionally produced meat. The aim of this paper is to amend the previous study by considering alternative production scenarios. The impacts of replacing cyanobacteria based nutrient media with plant based media are assessed. This paper includes more specific modelling of a bioreactor suitable for cultured meat production. Further, this study estimates the water footprint of cultured meat based on a method that is compliant with life cycle assessment. The environmental impacts of cultured meat are compared with conventionally produced meat and with plant based protein sources. It is concluded that regardless of the high uncertainty ranges cultured meat has potential to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and land use when compared to conventionally produced meat.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Final technical report: Certification of low carbon farming practices

In 2010, the European Parliament asked the European Commission to carry out a pilot project on the “certification of low-carbon farming practices in the European Union” to promote reductions of GHG emissions from farming. The overall aim of the project was to assess how efforts of European farmers to produce agricultural products with carbon-neutral or low-carbon-footprint farming practices might be incorporated into policy approaches (possibly via certification), so as to promote the reduction of GHG emissions from agriculture. The project included: i) a review of existing farm-level lifecycle-based climate-related certification and labelling schemes, ii) the development and testing of a user friendly open-source carbon calculator suitable for assessing the lifecycle GHG emissions from different types of farming systems across the whole EU, and iii) the design/assessment of policy options for promoting low-carbon farming practices.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Assessing agriculture vulnerabilities for the design of effective measures for adaptation to climate change (AVEMAC project)

This final report of the AVEMAC study presents an assessment of the potential vulnerability of European agriculture to changing climatic conditions in the coming decades. The analysis is based on weather data generated from two contrasting realizations of the A1B emission scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the time horizons 2020 and 2030. These two realizations (obtained from two different general circulation models, downscaled using regional climate models and biascorrected) represent the warmest and coldest realizations of the A1B scenario over Europe as estimated by the ENSEMBLES project. The future weather data fed two types of analyses. The first analysis consisted in computing static agro-meteorological indicators as proxies of potential vulnerabilities of agricultural systems, expressed as changes in the classification of agricultural areas in Europe under climate constraints. The second analysis relied on biophysical modelling to characterize crop specific plant responses derived from crop growth simulations at different production levels (potential production, water-limited production, and production limited by diseases). Assessing the importance of vulnerability to climate change requires not only the localisation of relative yield changes, but also the analysis of the impact of the change on the acreage affected. Consequently, the simulation results of the impact assessment on crops were further processed to estimate the potential changes in production at sub-national (NUTS2) level. This was achieved by relating the simulation results to farm typologies in order to identify which types of systems are likely to be affected by reductions in production. The analyses of this study must be considered as a first step only, since they have neither included adaptation strategies that the farmer can take in response to changes in climate, nor a bio-economic evaluation of estimated vulnerabilities. Therefore, the main aspects and the requirements for a possible future integrated analysis at EU27 level to address climate change and agriculture with the target of providing policy support are also presented in this report. Eventually the results of this study shall help the formulation of appropriate policy options and the development of adequate policy instruments to support the adaptation to climate change of the EU agricultural sector.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource

Perspectives for Information Systems for Water

This article gives the perspectives for Water Informations Systems in Europe. In the EU there is currently a strong concerted effort to improve the information flow and accessibility of water data, and in fact EU water policies have evolved fast in the last few years. The Water Framework Directive (also known as the WFD or Directive 2000/60/EC) is a very important piece of legislation for the protection and improvement of the quality of all water resources within the European Union. Considering the complexity of the technical issues, it is recognised that a common approach to some of these challenges would allow the sharing of expertise, information, experience and resources whilst facilitating, as far as possible, a coherent and harmonious implementation of the Directive. This of course has implications for the information systems.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

Environmental Data Exchange for Inland Water

This article gives an overall introduction to the book: Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water. In a world where computing power, storage capacity and network size all tend to grow exponentially, exchange of data is growing at a similar rate. From a purely informationtechnology point of view, any data packet sent over the network is exchange of data, and is thus linked to the overall network traffic. Searching the Web for relevant information has become commonplace; indeed, it is at times difficult to imagine how cumbersome the search for information was before the World Wide Web. It is amazing to see the ease with which it is now possible to search for and find, for instance, telephone numbers, addresses, flight information and scientific publications (just to mention a few). However, for other types of data, the search is more difficult and has yet to realise the full potential of the full data exchange. On the philosophical level, one could speculate that the exchange of document information through the World Wide Web has been so successful due to the fact that the HyperText Markup language (HTML) was invented at the same time as the first browsers became operational and that the protocol and the language were so simple and easy to use. For data held in databases, this was not the case, with different standards and proprietary software already in place on stand-alone computers, making data exchange an inherently difficult problem. These general problems on data exchange are also relevant for data exchange in the environmental field, especially in the field of Inland Water. For the environmental topic of surface water, one additional physical characteristic is fundamental: water runs downhill (!) Environmental data for one water body upstream of another is therefore always relevant and allows the inference of some scientific and technical information about the water body downstream. With this in mind, the Environmental Data Exchange Network for Inland Water (EDEN-IW) project was started, aiming to facilitate and increase data exchange. The perspectives and the visions of the needs are that a citizen or a user, including policy makers, needs to be able to get rapid answers to environmental questions on inland waters, without any knowledge about what data sources might be available or how to connect to them. The questions may range from global to continental, from national to local, following political boundaries or catchment areas as required. In principle, a large number of existing Inland Water databases in the world could be linked together, providing citizens with access to a worldwide inland water database, together with tools to assess the information and regulate the inland water environment in a more efficient and effective way than in the current situation. A key driving force for the project was to meet the needs and expectations of high-quality affordable services related to environmental data, initially on the Inland Water field, but with perspectives and visions that include more general information related to the environment. The goals of the project with an integrative approach as a fundamental point of departure are well adapted to the requirements for policy issues in areas where the information society technologies, by nature, require close co-ordination with various research programmes and where the deployment plays a critical role. The challenges were and are significant. Previous experience, relevant technologies and technological advancements had to be examined, leading to research and development of specific information technology solutions.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

Influence of Safety Measures on the Risks of Transporting Dangerous Goods through Road Tunnels.

Abstract not availableJRC.G-Institute for the Protection and the Security of the Citizen (Ispra

Regulatory Requirements for Biocides on the Market in the European Union According to Directive 98/8/EC.

Abstract not availableJRC.I-Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (Ispra

A Water Reference for Europe

The harmonization of environmental policies in the European Union regarding the protection of water supplies is, since 2002, focusing on the so-called Water Framework Directive (WFD). This directive states as one of its goals the ambition to enhance the exchange of geographic data describing the location of objects relevant for the monitoring of water quantity and quality. This chapter will focus on the creation of this common European Water Data Reference System in which geographic data ranging from fresh water bodies like small ponds to tidal areas along thecoast are to be shared between the member states committed to this directive.JRC.H.5-Rural, water and ecosystem resource

A European perspective of innovations toward mitigation of nitrogen-related greenhouse gases

Technology design and effectiveness studies available in the scientific literature demonstrate future mitigation potentials of nitrogen-related greenhouse gases. Here we investigate “innovations” influencing such emissions. These innovations mainly address agriculture: reduced meat diets, urban gardening, genetically modified crops, and precision farming, but also more distant options like vertical farming and cultured meat production, that is, indoor agriculture. While the latter approaches, which allow full management of effluents, seem very promising in terms of emission control, the cost estimates available would rule out any practical relevance. Technologies that currently seem more realistic offer much smaller mitigation potential. Information on energy need, greenhouse gas emissions, and land requirements feed into a semi-quantitative assessment, which delivers information in a format useful for existing European policy tools.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource