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

PARALLEL SESSION 3A: LAND USE CHANGE 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Table 5. Crop specific CO2 emissions per year per ha of annual crops in mainland France, 2005 - 2009. Average
CO2 emissions, weighted by production area in each French region, from LUC expressed per ha of the
total area of annual crop.
Annual crop Emission factor (t CO2/ha)
Sugar beet 0.30
Durum wheat 0.72
Wheat 0.58
Rapeseed 0.56
Faba bean 0.38
Silage maize 0.79
Maize 0.68
Barley 0.57
Pea 0.50
272
Potato 0.36
Temporary grassland
0.89
Sunflower 0.73
Triticale 0.92
In the methods proposed here, as soon as a variation of area for a type of land use was observed over the
last 20 years, we considered that a LUC occurred, unlike for instance Milà i Canals et al., (2012), who propose
a decision tree in two steps to determine if a LUC occurred over the last 20 years. The first step determines
if the area of a crop increased in the country. If it increased, the second step determines if the total
land type area for the considered crop also increased. If the answer to both is positive, a LUC is considered
to have taken place. Furthermore, short-term fluctuations are smoothed out by the use of 5 years’ average
areas. It could be interesting to implement this last point in the method proposed here. Effectively, in the
studied systems, temporary grasslands are frequent and can lead to mistakes in the counting of each land type
area.
The methods proposed here aim to assess soil C dynamics associated with LUC in mainland France.
However, the goal of Agri-BALYSE is to provide a methodology for harmonized LCIs of agricultural products,
whether produced in mainland France or abroad. To achieve this goal at short term, and considering the
current methodological developments, the method proposed by Milà i Canals et al., (2012) seems to be the
most complete and operational, in particular when data availability and quality are insufficient to implement
the methods proposed in this paper.
Within the Agri-BALYSE programme a considerable amount of effort has been invested in the development
of the two methods described here, even though the development of methods is not part of the programme’s
mandate. After a major internal debate no consensus was found for the implementation of either
method within the programme, mainly because these methods have not yet been validated by publication in a
peer-reviewed journal. It was decided that CO2 emissions resulting from land use change will not be considered
in the Agri-BALYSE LCI database. However, a description of both methods proposed here and LCI
results including CO2 emissions according to both methods will be documented in the methodological report
of the programme.
5. Conclusion
This work allowed a major advance in the consideration of soil carbon dynamic in LCAs of French agricultural
goods. Two methods to estimate soil C dynamics from direct LUC for permanent grassland and annual
crops in mainland France were developed. However, there is scope for a further refinement of these
methods. We identified some specific points in the methodology which can be improved. These methods
have not been implemented in the current version of the Agri-BALYSE database. They should be tested before
implementing them in an operational database destined to support the sensitive issue of environmental
labelling.
These improvements concern: i) estimation of areas that have undergone LUC and ii) calculation of cropspecific
emission factors. The results presented in Table 5 are a first estimation of these crop-specific emission
factors and need to be validated. Concerning estimations of areas having undergone LUC, while developing
the two methods, we used data from Teruti-Lucas. These data need a treatment to be used in the calculations.
This has been done by CITEPA on the one hand and by SSP on the other hand. The LUC areas ob-