Henry King

• DPhil
• Unilever

More than 10 million tonnes of metal salts of fatty acids are manufactured worldwide every year, to create a range of soft condensed‐matter cosmetic products such as bar soaps, liquid washes, deodorant sticks, skin creams, toothpastes, and so on. These salts, popularly known as soaps, mainly use palm or tallow‐based oils as the source of fatty acid...

Many companies have made zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to reduce carbon emissions and biodiversity losses linked to tropical commodities. However, ZDCs conserve areas primarily based on tree cover and aboveground carbon, potentially leading to the unintended consequence that agricultural expansion could be encouraged in biomes outside tropi...

Many companies are making ambitious pledges to achieve positive impacts for climate and nature by financing restoration of carbon- and biodiversity- rich natural habitats. However, companies cannot make evidence-based choices that will deliver successful restoration if the scientific information required to guide investment has not been synthesised...

Background Oil palm is a key driver of deforestation, but increasing yields in existing plantations could help meet rising global demands, while avoiding further conversion of natural habitat. Current oil palm plantations present substantial opportunities for sustainable intensification, but the potential for local yield improvements depends partly...

Moratoria on commodities produced in deforestation-risk areas have been shown to be highly effective in reducing deforestation within targeted areas. Various studies have shown, however, that such policies are prone to large local spillover effects, i.e., non-trivial changes (reductions or increases) in the amount of deforestation in areas just out...

Climate change poses a significant threat to global biodiversity, but freshwater fishes have been largely ignored in climate change assessments. Here, we assess threats of future flow and water temperature extremes to ~11,500 riverine fish species. In a 3.2 °C warmer world (no further emission cuts after current governments’ pledges for 2030), 36%...

Purpose The planetary boundaries framework contains regional boundaries in addition to global boundaries. Geographically resolved methods to assess regional environmental impacts are therefore needed. Existing planetary boundaries-based life cycle assessment (PB-LCA) methods have limited geographical resolution or are not applicable to full product...

In many regions and at the planetary scale, human pressures and resulting impacts on the environment exceed levels that natural systems can sustain. These pressures are caused by networks of human activities, which often extend across countries and continents due to global trade. This has led to an increasing requirement for methods that enable abs...

The production of palm oil, soy, beef and timber are key drivers of global forest loss. For this reason, over 470 companies involved in the production, processing or distribution of these commodities have issued commitments to eliminate or reduce deforestation from their supply chains. However, the effectiveness of these commitments is uncertain si...

Maintaining forest conservation set-asides is a key criterion of sustainability certification of many crops that drive tropical deforestation, but their value for carbon storage and associated biodiversity is unclear. We conducted vegetation measurements to examine the benefits of set-asides for aboveground carbon stocks (AGC) in certified oil palm...

Packaging materials can be a source of chemical contaminants in food. Process-based migration models (PMM) predict the chemical fraction transferred from packaging materials to food (FC) for application in prioritisation tools for human exposure. These models, however, have a relatively limited applicability domain and their predictive performance...

Existing methods for applying the planetary boundary concept in life cycle assessment are not sufficiently spatially and temporally resolved. Here, we develop a new method for freshwater use based on the safe operating space (SOS) at watershed-level. The SOS is based on the concept of environmental flow requirements, which is the share of mean mont...

Variability in consumer practices and choices is typically not addressed in comparisons of environmental impacts of traditional shopping and e-commerce. Here, we developed a stochastic model to quantify the variability in the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints of product distribution and purchase of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) via three prevale...

Dams contribute to water security, energy supply, and flood protection but also fragment habitats of freshwater species. Yet, a global species-level assessment of dam-induced fragmentation is lacking. Here, we assessed the degree of fragmentation of the occurrence ranges of ∼10,000 lotic fish species worldwide due to ∼40,000 existing large dams and...

Existing methods that apply the planetary boundary for the nitrogen cycle in life cycle assessment are spatially generic and use an indicator with limited environmental relevance. Here, we develop a spatially resolved method that can quantify the impact of nitrogen emissions to air, soil, freshwater or coastal water on "safe operating space" (SOS)...

A reliable quantification of the potential effects of chemicals on freshwater ecosystems requires ecotoxicological response data for a large set of species which is typically not available in practice. In this study, we propose a method to estimate hazardous concentrations (HCs) of chemicals on freshwater ecosystems by combining two in silico appro...

Indian households connected to improved water sources still need to purify their water before drinking. In this study, environmental impacts of three purification options in urban India were compared: (a) boiling water, (b) bottled, purified water, and (c) purifying the water with a domestic reverse-osmosis (RO) device. Primary data for the manufac...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to translate the planetary boundaries (PBs) concept to the scale of decisions related to products. Existing PB-LCA methods convert quantified resource use and emissions to changes in the values of PB control variables. However, the control variable for the Land-system change PB, “area of forested land remaini...

Palm oil, the most widely used vegetable oil, is one of the largest drivers of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from global land use and land cover change. Here, we provide fine-resolution (100 m × 100 m) estimates of GHG footprints of current (2015) and potential future scenarios (2030) of crude palm oil (CPO) production in Indonesia. The current es...

Understanding variability in consumer behavior can provide further insights into how to effectively reduce environmental footprints related to household activities. Here, we developed a stochastic model to quantify the energy, greenhouse gas (GHG), and water consumption footprints of showering in four different countries (Australia, Switzerland, th...

The use of down-the-drain products and the resultant release of chemicals may lead to pressures on the freshwater environment. Ecotoxicological impact assessment is a commonly used approach to assess chemical products but is still influenced by several uncertainty and variability sources. As a result, the robustness and reliability of such assessme...

Advances in satellite remote sensing and the wealth of earth observation (EO) data now available have improved efforts toward determining and quantifying historical land use and land cover (LULC) change. Satellite imagery can overcome the absence of accurate records of historical land use; however, the variability observed in the case study regions...

Purpose Variability in consumer behaviour can significantly influence the environmental performance of products and their associated impacts and this is typically not quantified in life cycle assessments. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how consumer behaviour data can be used to understand and quantify the variability in the greenhouse gas...

The Planetary Boundaries concept has emerged as a framework for articulating environmental limits, gaining traction as a basis for considering sustainability in business settings, government policy and international guidelines. There is emerging interest in using the Planetary Boundaries concept as part of life cycle assessment (LCA) for gauging ab...

In 2013, the European Commission launched the Environmental Footprint Rules pilot phase. This initiative aims at setting specific rules for life cycle assessment (LCA: raw material sourcing, production, logistics, use, and disposal phase) studies within 1 product category, called product environmental footprint category rules (PEFCR), and for organ...

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2018.52.

Streamflow data is highly relevant for a variety of socio-economic as well as ecological analyses or applications, but a high-resolution global streamflow dataset is yet lacking. We created FLO1K, a consistent streamflow dataset at a resolution of 30 arc seconds (~1 km) and global coverage. FLO1K comprises mean, maximum and minimum annual flow for...

The 67th Discussion Forum on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), organised by partners of the European project RELIEF (RELIability of product Environmental Footprints), focused on methods for better understanding the impacts of land use linked to agricultural value chains. The first session of the forum was dedicated to methods that help in retrospective...

Our study provides an integrated analysis of the variability of greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints of field grown tomatoes for processing. The global farm-specific dataset of 890 observations across 14 countries over a three-year period (2013-2015) was obtained from farms grown under Unilever’s sustainable agricultural code. It repre-sents on average...

Deriving reliable estimates of chemical emissions to the environment is a key challenge for impact and risk assessment methods and typically the associated uncertainty is not characterised. We have developed an approach to spatially quantify annual chemical emission loads to the aquatic environment together with their associated uncertainty using c...

Nearly 800 million people in India lack access to adequate sanitation. The choice of technology for addressing this need may have important sustainability implications. In this study, we used life cycle assessment to compare environmental impacts and nutrient recovery potentials of four different options for providing everyone in India with access...

The performance of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts can vary considerably within a single crop supply chain, due to differences in farming practices, soil properties, and yearly climatic conditions. In this paper, we characterised the variability of carbon footprints of open-field tomato production by analysing a comprehensive f...

The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework represents a significant advance in specifying the ecological constraints on human development. However, to enable decision-makers in business and public policy to respect these constraints in strategic planning, the PB framework needs to be developed to generate practical tools. With this objective in mind,...

Freshwater is a vital component in the global ecosystem. Freshwater is a unique environmental habitat and also essential for human life. Freshwater pollution not only poses a risk to the environment, but it can also impact human health as well. Therefore, it is important to maintain anthropogenic pollution below a threshold that would characterise...

Quantifying mean annual flow of rivers (MAF) at ungauged sites is essential for assessments of global water supply, ecosystem integrity and water footprints. MAF can be quantified with spatially explicit process-based models, which might be overly time-consuming and data-intensive for this purpose, or with empirical regression models that predict M...

Unilever is a leading example of a multinational company in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sector. Unilever has long been an advocate of sustainable business, using scientific assessment as the basis for its strategy and initiatives. Given its business, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is established within the company and there is a current focu...

Supplementary Figures 1-3 and Supplementary Tables 1-2

Carbon stock estimates based on land cover type are critical for informing climate change assessment and landscape management, but field and theoretical evidence indicates that forest fragmentation reduces the amount of carbon stored at forest edges. Here, using remotely sensed pantropical biomass and land cover data sets, we estimate that biomass...

Background: A.I.S.E., the International Association for Soaps, Detergents and Maintenance Products, launched the 'A.I.S.E. Charter for Sustainable Cleaning' in Europe in 2005 to promote sustainability in the cleaning and maintenance products industry. This Charter is a proactive programme for translating the concept of sustainable innovation into...

Significance Deforestation is a major threat to biodiversity and many ecosystem services and is closely linked to agricultural expansion. Sustainability assessment of different agricultural products and policies requires an understanding of the impacts of land conversion resulting from shifts in demand or incentives for production. The prevailing a...

Agriculture and forestry (including land use changes) contribute approximately 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, but have a significant mitigation potential. Several activities to reduce GHGs at a landscape scale are under development (e.g. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation activities or Clean...

LCA tools to certify products and guide farm management have proliferated but a detailed comparison is needed to show whether differ-ent tools are consistent. In this work, three widely used tools for cradle-to-gate emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have been inves-tigated -one general tool (CoolFarm Tool) and two crop-specific tools (Bonsucro f...

Purpose Bio-based products are often considered sustainable due to their renewable nature. However, the environmental performance of products needs to be assessed considering a life cycle perspective to get a complete picture of potential benefits and trade-offs. We present a life cycle assessment of the global commodity ethanol, produced from diff...

The number of private and voluntary agri-food standards, or certification schemes, has boomed in recent years. Their proliferation and prominence has been fuelled, in part, through wide-scale adoption by agri-food supply chain actors using them to display environmental credentials and to signify that products have been ‘sustainably sourced’. As bot...

The agri-food sector, and specifically agricultural production, is a major contributor to climate change. In order to manage the impact on the climate, a better understanding of the variability of global warming potential in agriculture is needed. This study assesses the variability in global warming potential of 27 crops using the modular extrapol...

Many assessments of product carbon footprint (PCF) for agricultural products omit emissions arising from land-use change (LUC). In this study, we developed a framework based on IPCC national greenhouse gas inventory methodologies to assess the impacts of LUC from crop production using oil palm, soybean and oilseed rape as examples. Using ecological...

Consumer goods manufacturers aiming to reduce the environmental impact associated with their products commonly pursue incremental change strategies, but more radical approaches may be required if we are to address the challenges of sustainable consumption. One strategy to realize step change reductions is to prepare a portfolio of innovations provi...

Purpose The degradation of chemicals in the environment is often excluded from life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. This paper describes a method to account for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from degradation, namely carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Materials and methods A multi-media fate model is proposed to estimate...

There is an increasing need for life cycle data for bio‐based products, which becomes particularly evident with the recent drive for greenhouse gas reporting and carbon footprinting studies. Meeting this need is challenging given that many bio‐products have not yet been studied by life cycle assessment (LCA), and those that have are specific and li...

Purpose Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been identified as one of Unilever’s priority environmental impact themes: this assessment was therefore conducted to help the Knorr brand measure and understand the GHG emissions related to its product portfolio, identify opportunities to manage GHG emissions in the Unilever-owned operations (manufacture...

Pressure on consumer goods manufacturers to develop new products with significantly less environmental impact is growing, through increased consumer awareness of environmental issues and governments setting ambitious emissions reductions targets. A strategic response to this pressure is to prepare a portfolio of innovative product ideas to meet a r...

Unilever has recently launched its Sustainable Living Plan. It includes a target to halve the average per consumer use greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of the business by 2020. To set the GHG impact baseline for this target approximately 1600 representative products across 14 countries were measured, representing about 70 % of Unilever's sales. The resu...

MEXALCA (Modular EXtrapolation of Agricultural LCA) extrapolates crop inventory data and impacts from an original country inventory to all producing countries worldwide. This allows estimates of worldwide means weighted by production volumes and of the environmental impact distribution. In this paper, the relationship between the yield and the envi...

PurposeLife cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used for the environmental assessment of food products, but difficulties arise when evaluating large portfolios of food products or when faced with a diversity of sources of ingredients and/or frequent changes of suppliers. In such situations, a specific, in-depth assessment of each ingredient is not fea...

In recent years society as a whole has become more aware and concerned about environmental issues. In light of increasingly stringent legislation and the more critical eyes of external stakeholders, companies have come to realise the heightened need for their actions to be seen as environmentally responsible. The innovation process provides compani...

Traditional methods for quantifying specific catabolic bacterial populations underestimate the true population count due to the limitations of the necessary laboratory cultivation methods. Likewise, in situ activity is also difficult to assess in the laboratory without altering the sample environment. To circumvent these problems and achieve a true...

The well-characterized plasmid-encoded naphthalene degradation pathway in Pseudomonas putida PpG7(NAH7) was used to investigate the role of the NAH plasmid-encoded pathway in mineralizing phenanthrene and anthracene. Three Pseudomonas strains, designated 5R, DFC49, and DFC50, were recovered from a polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon-degrading inoculum...

On-line detection of bacterial adhesion in a shear flow gradient was measured with an engineered bioluminescent bacterium. Parallel plate flow cells showed colonization by a Pseudomonas fluorescens strain containing the Vibrio fisheri (lux) bioluminescent operon. When induced by sodium salicylate, bulk phase and sessile cells were assayed quantitat...

The objectives of work described in the report were to provide fundamental information on the microbiology and biochemistry of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) biodegradation, and to continue development and initiate applications for molecular techniques in providing needed information for biodegradation process monitoring and control. A sign...

The formation of microbial biofilms on metal surfaces with the subsequent increase in heat transfer resistance and the induction of microbially influenced corrosion (MIC) is being increasingly recognized as an extremely important economic and safety problem for industrial water systems. The development of sufficiently rugged and accurate monitoring...

Periodic perturbations were used to evaluate the system stability and robustness of naphthalene biodegradation in a continuous flow stirred tank reactor (CSTR) containing a soil slurry. The experimental design involved perturbing the test system using a sinusoidal input either of naphthalene or non-naphthalene organic carbon at different frequencie...

A bioluminescent reporter plasmid for naphthalene catabolism (pUTK21) was developed by transposon (Tn4431) insertion of the lux gene cassette from Vibrio fischeri into a naphthalene catabolic plasmid in Pseudomonas fluorescens. The insertion site of the lux transposon was the nahG gene encoding for salicylate hydroxylase. Luciferasemediated light p...

An experimental and mathematical method is developed for the microbial systems analysis of polyaromatic hydrocarbon (PAH)-degrading mixed cultures in PAH-contaminated “town gas” soil systems. Frequency response is the primary experimental and data analysis tool used to probe the structure of these complicated systems. The objective is to provide a...

The formation of microbial biofilms on metal surfaces with the subsequent increase in heat transfer resistance and the induction of microbially influenced corrosion (MIC) is being increasingly recognized as an extremely important economic and safety problem for industrial water systems. The development of sufficiently rugged and accurate monitoring...

The environmental and ecological significance of catabolic plasmids and their host strains are discussed in the context of their potential application for environmental biotechnology. Included is a comprehensive list of naturally occurring discrete catabolic plasmids isolated from either natural habitats or selective enrichment studies. General pro...

In recent years society as a whole has become more aware and concerned about environmental issues. In light of increasingly stringent legislation and the more critical eyes of external stakeholders, companies have come to realise the heightening need for their actions to be seen as environmental ly responsible. The innovation process provides compa...

The authors have constructed recombinant plasmids which function as reporters of naphthalene and salicylate, the former a significant chemical contaminant. These strains should prove valuable both as a tool of molecular genetics in describing the genetic expression and physiological response of the bacterial cell in the presence of chemical contami...