Sustainable food production and consumption are very important parts of the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the member states of the United Nations. Life cycle assessment (LCA) as an assessment tool is very well-suited to help towards this. The scope of food LCA studies covers not only the processing stage but also upstream (i.e., raw material production—agriculture, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, and packaging production) and downstream (i.e., distribution, consumption, and waste disposal) activities including related transport in all stages. The life cycle impact assessment results covering multiple impacts in quantitative terms facilitate the identification of hotspots (i.e., the main life cycle stage and activities causing significant impacts) to derive strategies for life cycle management to improve the environmental performance of product and promote the shift towards sustainable agriculture and food production systems including more sustainable food consumption patterns via environmental certification and labelling schemes. LCAs of studies on agriculture and food have come a long way with over 3000 articles being published until April 2020. Based on a Scopus search with “life cycle assessment” AND “agriculture” OR “food”, the number of articles showed a more than threefold increase from around 120 in 2010 and 2011 to over 400 in 2018 and 2019. Although the publications have been predominantly from the USA and Europe, it is also interesting to note that over this period, the contributions from Asia tripled from about 7% to over 20%. This might to some extent reflect the increase in research interest in this field in Asia (Gheewala 2012; Gheewala et al. 2017), culminating in the LCA Food 2018 conference being organized in Thailand. It was the 11th in a series of biannual conferences starting in 1996, attracting about 200 participants from 25 countries with around 160 oral and 40 poster presentations. As done in previous Food LCA Conferences (Nemecek et al. 2016; Notarnicola et al. 2016; van der Werf et al. 2014; Notarnicola et al. 2012), papers addressing some of the key and cutting-edge issues in sustainable food consumption and production were selected from this conference and a few more added from the normal flow of submissions to the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment to form this special issue comprising a total of 15 articles
No simple menu for sustainable food production and consumption
Notarnicola B.
;
2020-01-01
Abstract
Sustainable food production and consumption are very important parts of the so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the member states of the United Nations. Life cycle assessment (LCA) as an assessment tool is very well-suited to help towards this. The scope of food LCA studies covers not only the processing stage but also upstream (i.e., raw material production—agriculture, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, and packaging production) and downstream (i.e., distribution, consumption, and waste disposal) activities including related transport in all stages. The life cycle impact assessment results covering multiple impacts in quantitative terms facilitate the identification of hotspots (i.e., the main life cycle stage and activities causing significant impacts) to derive strategies for life cycle management to improve the environmental performance of product and promote the shift towards sustainable agriculture and food production systems including more sustainable food consumption patterns via environmental certification and labelling schemes. LCAs of studies on agriculture and food have come a long way with over 3000 articles being published until April 2020. Based on a Scopus search with “life cycle assessment” AND “agriculture” OR “food”, the number of articles showed a more than threefold increase from around 120 in 2010 and 2011 to over 400 in 2018 and 2019. Although the publications have been predominantly from the USA and Europe, it is also interesting to note that over this period, the contributions from Asia tripled from about 7% to over 20%. This might to some extent reflect the increase in research interest in this field in Asia (Gheewala 2012; Gheewala et al. 2017), culminating in the LCA Food 2018 conference being organized in Thailand. It was the 11th in a series of biannual conferences starting in 1996, attracting about 200 participants from 25 countries with around 160 oral and 40 poster presentations. As done in previous Food LCA Conferences (Nemecek et al. 2016; Notarnicola et al. 2016; van der Werf et al. 2014; Notarnicola et al. 2012), papers addressing some of the key and cutting-edge issues in sustainable food consumption and production were selected from this conference and a few more added from the normal flow of submissions to the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment to form this special issue comprising a total of 15 articlesI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
