LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

KEYNOTE SESSION 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
ment of products' environmental impacts through the Food SCP (Sustainable Consumption and Production)
Round Table. This Round Table should finalise the ENVIFOOD Protocol, a harmonised methodological
guide to assessing the environmental impacts of agri-food products, in autumn 2012.
France supports harmonisation in this field and is ready to adopt European methodological standards as
soon as they have been established via multi-stakeholder consultation processes, as is currently the case.
3.3 Which research for which project?
There still remains a significant need for research to achieve a complete environmental assessment of
agri-food products. Scientific advances, which concern all the participants to the LCA-FOOD 2012 conference,
are particularly anticipated for certain environmental challenges, namely:
a "water footprint" approached with more detail and relevance to agriculture, in other words, taking
account of the vulnerability of the environments from which water is abstracted,
a "biodiversity footprint"; on this point, LCA approaches that put too much emphasis on the effect of
land occupation are poorly understood by either agricultural producers or consumers. The MEDDE
(Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy) believes important progress must be
made to better take into account agriculture's impact on biodiversity and, at this stage, proposes
putting the emphasis rather on areas of biodiversity on farms.
More generally, tools are needed that can better take into account the environmental interest of extensive
farming's low use of inputs. The choice to use the functional unit of the kg or litre is liable to give a bonus to
the most intensive use of inputs, which makes sense for the overall environmental impacts but risks relegating
local impacts to the background. We are waiting for research to bring an analytical view to this point in
order to inform the public decision.
Another sensitive subject is the measurement of greenhouse gas emissions taking into account carbon
storage (Rabl et al., 2007 ; Benoist et al., 2012). Agricultural areas effectively present the characteristic of
not only being carbon emitters but also potential carbon sinks. LCAs, which originally stem from an industrial
environment, are still struggling to take account of this dimension. And yet it is essential, both from the
scientific point of view and to ensure LCA approach to be acceptable to agricultural producers.
These points lead to a more general remark on the relationship between research and society's stakeholders.
As mentioned above, sustainable development requires an increased dialogue between all parts of
society. Notably, research must be conducted in interaction with the needs and questions raised by businesses
and NGOs, including by taking into account their points of view on what the research should be and how it
should be conducted.
Public and private stakeholders are called to work with research to democratise LCA and provide the necessary
methods, tools and data. Research must lead to operational methods and robust data. In the agri-food
sector, the short-term provision of data that responds to the diversity of the methods of production, processing,
distribution and use by consumers is essential. The in-depth work already conducted by several sectors
should enable the calculation of new LCAs to be simplified.
The operational involvement of the scientific community is essential to ensuring the rigour of the methods
and tools as well as the quality of the data. Researchers are already involved, particularly in French and
European methodological work, but their involvement must increase further. This will enable all stakeholders,
including the consumers, to appropriate the subject of the environment and act rapidly faced by the
environmental crisis, in cooperation and by sharing scientific evidence culturally appropriated.
4. Conclusion
environmental labelling is an appropriate tool for promoting sustainable development in the agrifood
sector;
the large-scale development of this tool requires methodologies, tools and data to be rapidly
developed to calculate products' environmental impacts;
to do this, the involvement of and dialogue between all stakeholders, including scientific
communities, are essential; this is the price at which we will be able to confront the environmental
crisis with the support of robust evidence properly appropriated;
it may be useful to adopt temporary rules or provide rough data to begin with, in order to be able to
shed some light over the short term and enable business and consumers to act immediately;
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