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Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers
Abstract and Figures
The global impacts of food production
Food is produced and processed by millions of farmers and intermediaries globally, with substantial associated environmental costs. Given the heterogeneity of producers, what is the best way to reduce food's environmental impacts? Poore and Nemecek consolidated data on the multiple environmental impacts of ∼38,000 farms producing 40 different agricultural goods around the world in a meta-analysis comparing various types of food production systems. The environmental cost of producing the same goods can be highly variable. However, this heterogeneity creates opportunities to target the small numbers of producers that have the most impact.
Science , this issue p. 987
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Supplementary resources (3)
... The food sector is a major contributor to climate change, and particularly, meat and dairy production are heavy emitters of greenhouse gases (Godfray et al., 2018;Poore and Nemecek, 2018). To reduce the climate impact from the food sector in line with foodrelated sustainability development goals and commitments under the Paris Agreement, changes in consumption patterns are vital (Moran et al., 2020;Willet et al., 2019). ...
... The climate impact of a product has both search qualities and credence qualities. The exact amount of carbon emissions from the production of a product depends on aspects such as technology use, management practices, and place of production (Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Springmann et al., 2018). Such aspects are not possible for the consumer to evaluate upon inspection or consumption, and it is, hence, a credence quality. ...
... Such aspects are not possible for the consumer to evaluate upon inspection or consumption, and it is, hence, a credence quality. However, while there are variations in carbon emission equivalents within product categories, the main differences are between product categories (Poore and Nemecek, 2018). Thus, the climate impact compared between product categories is not a credence quality. ...
Compared to other policy instruments that aim to change consumer behavior, information provision is perhaps the least controversial. An important question is how information in the form of carbon labels can contribute to direct food consumption toward reduced climate impact. From a policy guidance perspective, there is a need to identify how the labeling strategy affects consumers’ ability to identify lower emitting food products and the behavioral change due to carbon information. Key aspects of a carbon label are discussed, as well as the implications of different labeling schemes. Drawing on economic and behavioral theories, we propose that, to assist consumers in identifying changes in consumption that contribute to significant reductions in their climate impact, a carbon label must enable comparisons between product groups and not only within narrowly defined product groups. This suggests mandatory labeling, since producers of high-emission products are less likely to display such labels. However, it is important to consider both costs and benefits of labeling schemes and to consider complementing labeling with other policy instruments.
... 4 Therefore, the well-being of humanity and the degradation of the biosphere cannot remain disconnected for much longer. [5][6][7] In addition, such imbalances in the Earth's systems increase the vulnerability of human societies to the contemporary global health challenges, such as emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, as shown by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19) pandemic, antimicrobial resistance, and the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). 8 This becomes even more critical by the interplay of these issues, scaling up the complexity of the challenges we face. ...
... Consumer choices may ultimately determine the demand for food and, consequently, the use of natural resources and environmental degradation. 18,19 In addition, dietary choices also affect human health signicantly and, together with other components of lifestyle, are largely responsible for the current (and increasing) high prevalence of NCDs. 20 Thirdly, improving the efficiency in the supply-side may have negative impacts on the demand-side, such as unhealthy eating due to changes in food availability and food prices. ...
... 114 In general lines, the research has showed that plant-based foods (such as grains, fruits and vegetables) have a lower environmental impact per unit of weight, per unit of nutrient or serving than animal foods in all the indicators analyzed. 19,115 Because animals belong to a higher trophic level of the food chain compared with plants, they require a larger amount of energy and resources for their growth and development. In addition, big animals require a long breastfeeding and rearing phase, and consequently consume more energy and resources. ...
Healthy and sustainable diets should be put at the center of food systems planning if we want to feed the growing population while making a sustainable use of natural resources and to protect biodiversity.
... Food data for each environmental indicator was obtained from Clark et al. (2022), who integrated 111 environmental datasets from Poore and Nemecek, HESTIA, and the Blue Food Assessment into one consolidated dataset (Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Gephart et al., 2021;Clark et al., 2022). Poore and Nemecek sourced Life Cycle Assessment data from peer-reviewed publications between 2000 and June 2016 and fed model algorithms available on HESTIA while the Blue Food Assessment also synthesizes Life Cycle Assessment data from several sources (Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Gephart et al., 2021). ...
... Food data for each environmental indicator was obtained from Clark et al. (2022), who integrated 111 environmental datasets from Poore and Nemecek, HESTIA, and the Blue Food Assessment into one consolidated dataset (Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Gephart et al., 2021;Clark et al., 2022). Poore and Nemecek sourced Life Cycle Assessment data from peer-reviewed publications between 2000 and June 2016 and fed model algorithms available on HESTIA while the Blue Food Assessment also synthesizes Life Cycle Assessment data from several sources (Poore and Nemecek, 2018;Gephart et al., 2021). We calculated average metrics for the overarching categories of fruits, seeds, nuts, poultry, seafood, legumes, and vegetables in order to categorize more specific food items in each diet that were not included in Clark et al.'s dataset. ...
Introduction
Sustainable diets and their overall impact on the environment and human health have garnered global attention. Environmental impact, human nutrition, and affordability are three relevant dimensions for assessing overall sustainability of diets. Using a relative sustainability score, we compare the Mediterranean, paleo, ketogenic, vegetarian, and vegan diets, along with the World Health Organization dietary guidelines in order to evaluate which diets are most sustainable.
Methods
Environmental, nutrition, and price data on individual food items were collected and used to analyze diets. Using an online meal- prep program, one week's worth of meals standardized at 2,000 kilocalories per day was generated for each diet. Estimates of greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, land use, water withdrawals, nutritional quality, and affordability were calculated. Ultimately an overall relative sustainability score based on these metric averages were used to compare diets.
Results
Our model indicates that vegan, Mediterranean, and vegetarian diets are the most sustainable across all metrics while meat-heavy diets, such as the ketogenic diet, have the greatest negative environmental impact. A diet based on the World Health Organization's dietary guidelines performed poorly with regards to affordability, environmental impacts, and nutritional quality. Diets with higher nutritional quality included the vegan, paleo, and Mediterranean diets. Diets that eliminate meat were the cheapest both by total cost and by cost per gram of food.
Discussion
Diets with the highest overall sustainability score share a common characteristic: they all suggest that consumers committed to sustainability should prioritize ‘plant-forward' diets. In contrast, diets rich in meat and animal products perform poorly overall but especially in terms of environmental sustainability.
... Particularly red meat is associated with GHG emissions orders of magnitude larger than white meat, fish, and plantbased foods (Clark, Springmann et al., 2022;Poore & Nemecek, 2019) (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain for a variety of foods, based on data by Poore & Nemecek (2018), graph by Ritchie (2020). ...
... In other words, the million-years old Amazon rainforest is increasingly destroyed to produce meat. Globally, the vast majority of agricultural land is used for pasture and for growing animal feed; cutting out beef and mutton from global diets would more than half the land used for agriculture (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). In addition, agriculture, aquaculture and fishing threaten land and marine ecosystems, for example through eutrophication from fertiliser overuse. ...
... Globally, the living environment is already getting worse (Andersen, 2020;Trisos et al., 2020;United Nations, 2022b;United Nations General Assembly, 2022;World Meteorological Organization, 2021;Xu et al., 2020), the situation is expected to get worse as a growing population is experiencing dietary transition throughout the world, that is, the consumption of high-fat and high-calorie food increases (Foley et al., 2011;Poore & Nemecek, 2018), resulting in overconsumption of resources and environmental degradation (Godfray et al., 2010;Alexander et al., 2016;Schiermeier, 2019). Facing the dilemma of food, diet and living environment, the academic debate on the relationship between diet structure transformation and living environment is increasing. ...
Exploring the evolution of residents’ dietary structure and its effects on the living environment is significant for realizing the global sustainable goal. This study constructed a theoretical framework to explore the relationship between diet structure and living environment, took the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region as the research object, analyzed the evolution characteristics of the dietary structure, and used the carbon emission coefficient method and the introduction of virtual water and virtual land concepts to investigate the living environment effects of dietary structure evolution. The results showed that from 2010 to 2018, the dietary structure of residents in the “Yarlung Zangbo River and its two tributaries” agricultural area on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau evolved from a plant-based diet to a diversified diet. The burden on the living environment gradually weakened with the dietary structure evolution. Compared to 2010, per capita food carbon emissions and water and land resources consumption decreased by 27.2%, 24.5%, and 15.8%, respectively. However, compared with the balanced diet model of the Chinese Dietary Guidelines 2022, the food carbon emissions in the study area increased significantly by 29.4%, land resource utilization increased by 2.5%, and water resource utilization gradually approached the critical value. Furthermore, we found that regions with high meat consumption put more burden on the living environment. Therefore, we suggest that encouraging residents to reduce meat consumption and optimize diet structure may be an effective way to achieve a sustainable living environment in the future.
... Agriculture and its activities are responsible for the impact on the environment (Poore and Nemecek, 2018). The impact intensity is also related to the intensity of agricultural production itself (Bernas et al., 2021c). ...
Nitrogen (N) supply is a relevant factor in wheat production, affecting yield and yield components. However, this input plays a dominant role in the environmental impact level arising within all the on-farm growing processes. To assess the effects of N fertilization on environmental impact levels, the agricultural life cycle assessment (LCA) was performed for facultative wheat as affected by sowing date (autumn versus spring) and N fertilization (0, 50, 100, 150, and 200 kg ha − 1) on a chernozem soil under Pannonian conditions in Eastern Austria for two years (2019/2020 and 2020/2021). In this study, an LCA was performed to find the optimal cropping design to achieve a low environmental impact with an adequate yield level. Processes from cradle to farm gate were involved within the system boundary. As the functional units, grain N yield and land demand for generating the same grain N yield were used. SimaPro software and the ReCiPe 2016 method with Midpoint and Endpoint characterization model were involved. Data were interpreted for 18 impact categories. From an environmental point of view, wheat crops with high doses of N (˃ 150 kg ha − 1) were associated with the highest environmental impact. The appropriate grain N yield should be reached to balance the environmental impact resulting from the fertilizer application and all the other inputs. A sufficient increase in yield must be achieved with increased fertilization to justify additional emissions that are related to N fertilization. Variants of winter wheat with medium inputs of N (between 100 and 150 kg ha − 1) were associated with the lowest impact on the environment. Consequently, according to environmental impact assessment, it is disadvantageous not to fertilize wheat with N or, on the contrary, to over-fertilize it with N.
Chinese green governance aims to achieve green transition and high-quality development in agriculture. Economic growth theory uses total factor productivity (TFP), an index of input–output ratio, to measure development quality, which provides a classic framework to assess the process of green transition and high-quality development. On the way to carbon neutrality, the goal of green governance is to achieve a balancing act between “pollution reduction” and “greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction,” in addition to food security. Besides green policies, the government and other market entities can use non-institutional measures, including green technologies and finance, as green governance tools to achieve this end. This study clarifies the goals and tools of green governance and establishes a new analytic framework to investigate how to use these tools to achieve the aforementioned goals efficiently and effectively. The theoretical foundation, econometric method, and design of the new framework are introduced based on a TFP analysis. This framework sheds light on how to evaluate the achievement of these goals and how to accelerate green transition and high-quality development in the future.
Vitamin A comes from carrots, D from dairy, E from nuts and K from spinach? True, but there is way more to it. Liver is rich in numerous vitamins, but raising a cow has a different environmental load to growing produce, as much as they differ in taste and price. Vitamin D is technically a hormone, and it’s the result of sun exposure: humans, animals, plants, they all can synthesize it. Nuts offer plenty of vitamin E and they are tasty, but how much water does it take to grow them? Perhaps oilseeds can be considered as sustainable alternatives, not a replacement, just another option. Dietary sourcing of vitamin K is typically sustainable, but it can get more creative to increase consumer appeal. Green leafy vegetables can be used to make tasty dips or even flours that improve low gluten baked goods. Options are available, specific knowledge is discussed in this chapter.KeywordsDairyMeatPlant basedVitamin AVitamin DVitamin EVitamin K
The study of the environmental impact of agricultural products has significantly grown in recent years, as consumers now demand more information about the product’s footprint in the environment. The aim of this study is to assess the environmental impact of the life cycle phases of tsipouro production, which is one of the traditional products of Greece produced mainly from viticulture. The environmental analysis was performed through the study of eutrophication, global warming, photochemical oxidation and acidification, using the life cycle assessment methodology. The system was studied through fifteen subsystems and a 250 ml bottle of tsipouro, which was the basis of the calculations, was defined as a functional unit. From the results it appears that the process of tsipouro production is the subsystem with the highest energy consumption and the grape cultivation the one with the highest water consumption. In environmental impact the subsystem with the highest contribution is the cultivation of grapes. Also the subsystems production/transportation and use of fertilizers, bottle production/transportation and the process of tsipouro production have a significant contribution. In addition, some literature-based solutions are suggested. Some of the solutions are the use of clearer energy sources, the use of biodiesel and alternative cultivation methods without synthetic fertilizers. The results of this research can be used by tsipouro or similar industries to minimize the environmental impact and focus on the phases that are most involved in it.
Pasture systems for grass-fed beef production in the Gulf Coast region were evaluated for profitability and sustainability over the period 2009/2010 to 2011/2012. May-weaned steers were divided into groups and randomly placed into different pasture systems. Data on input usage, output quantities, and carbon emissions were recorded and analyzed. The least complex grazing system yielded higher profit than the most complex, but the most complex produced the lowest greenhouse gas impact. A trade-off was found between profitability and greenhouse gas impact among the systems.
In order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from beef production Uruguayan and New Zealand systems have a significant role to play. Despite the differences, both are exposed to the same threats, i.e. more profitable alternative systems competing for the land, with enhanced production through intensification being a common response, and increasing pressure on the environment. This issue has attracted attention around the world concerning climate change and GHG emissions associated with animal production systems. The comparison using a whole-farm model (OVERSEER®), shows clear differences in GHG emissions, with higher emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents, CO2 eq) per kilogram of beef on Uruguayan farms (18.4-21.0 kg CO2 eq/beef) compared with New Zealand farms (8-10 kg CO2 eq/beef) as a result of lower production efficiency. However, the emissions per hectare were higher on intensive New Zealand farms (3013-6683 kg CO2 eq/ha/year) than on Uruguayan farms (1895-2226 kg CO2 eq/ha/year) due to high stocking rates and increased inputs. Sensitivity analysis revealed a large effect of methodology and the benefit of using tier 2 factors that account for differences in animal productivity and feed quality. Nitrous oxide emissions factors for animal excreta determined in New Zealand are half of the default IPCC factors, while activity factors for indirect nitrous oxide emissions from excreta-ammonia and N leaching are 50% and 23% respectively. Increased feed conversion efficiency in the more intensive systems was associated with lower GHG intensity but farm systems also need to account for other environmental factors that are more important on a regional or catchment basis.
Feeding late maturing young bulls on high concentrate diets needs adjustment of both animal feeding behaviour and rumen adaptation which can be done by feeding maize silage according to researchers at the National Institute of Agronomic Research, Saint-Genès Champanelle, France who state good economic results are achievable alongside animal welfare.
This study aims to produce multicriteria environmental figures (using Life Cycle Assessment, LCA) associated with socioeconomicindicators for different types of pig units representative of the main French production standards. Eight systems are assessed,defined by their size, the degree of specialization and the location of the pig unit, the slurry management and the pig feedingstrategy. The results are expressed per kilogram live pig produced at the farm level, and the field for Life Cycle Analysis includesproduction and supply of inputs, construction of buildings, pig breeding and management of slurry. These reference standardsprovide a picture of the socioeconomic and environmental performance of French pig production systems and of their variabilitybetween and within systems. The environmental results make it possible to identify the most strategic and easily attainableoptions of improvement. The efficiency of different strategies is evaluated in connection with feed formulation, improvement ofanimal performance, and the implementation of recommended good environmental practices. The socioeconomic indicators showthe various levels of access to the action levers.
In a world with an increasing urban population, analyzing the construction impacts of sanitation infrastructures through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is necessary for defining the best environmental management strategies. The purpose of this research is studying application of the life cycle assessment methodology to Hazelnut production under rain fed farming systems in forest north of Iran. Data were collected from 36 farms by used a face to face questionnaire method during 2013 year in Guilan province. In rain fed farming system, total green house gases emissions for hazelnut production were showed table 2 (66.955 kgCO2eqha-1).
