Assessing carbon, water and land use footprints for beef cattle production in Southern Australia

Abstract

For agri-food products, concurrent assessment of GHG emissions, water use impacts and land use is necessary to communicate meaningfully about environmental performance and to avoid potential negative consequences of narrowly focussed environmental improvement initiatives, such as carbon footprint reduction. In this study, land use footprints were calculated for six diverse beef cattle production systems in southern Australia (cradle to farm gate) using net primary productivity of potential biomass (NPP0) as a means of describing the intrinsic productive capability of land. The results per kg live weight, ranging from 86 to 172 m2.yr-e (where 1 m2.yr-e represents 1 m2 of land occupation for 1 year at the global average NPP0) represent between 1.3 and 2.7% of an average global citizen’s annual land use footprint, and highlight the importance of land use in cattle production. These results were approximately 10 and 1000 times the normalised carbon and water footprint results. While NPP0 can be used to improve land use assessment beyond a simple measure of land area, further development of the land use footprint indicator is recommended