Monetisation of sustainability impacts of food production and consumption

WUR developed several frameworks to measure the sustainability of food in agricultural chains. To support decision making of firms, farms, government and consumers it is important to be able to compare the different sustainability issues. Monetisation is one way to express all issues in one unit. The possibilities for monetisation will be investigated in this knowledge base project. It is suggested to use the LCA methodology approved by the European Commission as a starting point for such avaluation approac

LC‐IMPACT: A regionalized life cycle damage assessment method

Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is a lively field of research, and data and models are continuously improved in terms of impact pathways covered, reliability, and spatial detail. However, many of these advancements are scattered throughout the scientific literature, making it difficult for practitioners to apply the new models. Here, we present the LC‐IMPACT method that provides characterization factors at the damage level for 11 impact categories related to three areas of protection (human health, ecosystem quality, natural resources). Human health damage is quantified as disability adjusted life years, damage to ecosystem quality as global species extinction equivalents (based on potentially disappeared fraction of species), and damage to mineral resources as kilogram of extra ore extracted. Seven of the impact categories include spatial differentiation at various levels of spatial scale. The influence of value choices related to the time horizon and the level of scientific evidence of the impacts considered is quantified with four distinct sets of characterization factors. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method with an illustrative life cycle assessment example of different fuel options in Europe (petrol or biofuel). Differences between generic and regionalized impacts vary up to two orders of magnitude for some of the selected impact categories, highlighting the importance of spatial detail in LCIA. This article met the requirements for a gold – gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Five propositions to harmonize environmental footprints of food and beverages

Several attempts have been made to harmonize guidelines for environmental footprints of food and beverages. For example, the food Sustainable Consumption and Production Roundtable, the Leap partnership, and the Environmental Footprint project, in particular within the Cattle Model Working Group. Despite all these activities, there are still many issues unresolved. This paper gives an overview of five important reasons why it is so difficult to reach consensus within the sector. In short, the issues are: 1) how to allocate deforestation to land use activities; 2) how to assess agricultural emissions profiles; 3) how to make regionalized water scarcity assessments; 4) how to choose the functional unit of food and beverages; and 5) how to deal with multi-functional processes in agro-industry. Recommendations as motivated in this paper are, in summary, to: 1) use the method to calculate the amount of land use change caused by increased pressure from growing areas per crop in each country; 2) always calculate agricultural emissions using at least an intermediate level of detail with the option to add more detail; 3) use good quality irrigation and crop evapotranspiration data, and at least country specific water scarcity factors; 4) report the environmental footprint results per unit of economic value besides per unit of mass or volume to enable fairer comparisons; 5) and apply economic allocation in all multi-functional agricultural and agri-industrial processes based on realistic prices calculated as multiple year averages