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

PARALLEL SESSION 7B: BEEF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
normalised results (Table 4), the land use footprint results were approximately 10 times the carbon footprint
results (range 9 to 18 times) and approximately 1000 times the water footprint results (range 39 to 2850).
4. Discussion
This study has highlighted the importance of land use in beef cattle production in southern Australia, with
the production of 1 kg of animal live weight requiring 1.3 to 2.7% of an average global citizen’s annual land
use footprint (Table 4). For 1 kg of retail beef, this equates to between 3 and 7% of an average global citizen’s
annual land use footprint. Globally, the livestock sector is a major land user, estimated to occupy
around 30% of the world’s land surface (Steinfeld et al., 2006). However, it is important to recognize that the
land base supporting livestock production is diverse, including high productivity crop and pasture land as
well as large areas of low productivity and non arable land. As such, the land use footprint calculation
method demonstrated in this paper, which takes into account the NPP0 of the land used in production, is considered
a better indicator of the pressure on global land resources than an assessment based on land area
alone. This is particularly important in evaluating alternative livestock production systems as globally there
is expansion in industrialised systems utilizing high nutrition feeds such as grains and oilseeds (de Haan et
al., 2010). The land base supporting livestock production is therefore in transition toward greater dedicated
use of high productivity cropland.
However, the NPP0 basis for assessing land quality is not completely satisfying. Firstly, there are additional
factors which determine the productive capability of land. For example, a global assessment of land
capability by Fischer et al., (2001) found that 12% of land is severely constrained for crop cultivation by
slope and 65% by unfavourable soil quality. The NPP0 values used in this study, taken from Haberl et al.,
(2007), incorporated climatic factors and a soil-type classification, but the spatial resolution of soil type
(0.5 o , approx 60 km at the equator) is too coarse to describe much of the variation at the farm level which
influences enterprise decision making for mixed farm systems in Australia. The second issue concerns the
potential substitutability of one land use with another, which is incompletely described by NPP0. Some pasture
land may have high NPP0, but have poor suitability for cropping, and therefore should not be regarded as
contributing to global pressure on arable land resources. On a global scale, NPP0 and crop yield are poorly
correlated (West et al., 2010). NPP0 is highest in the tropics whereas the highest crop yields are generally
found in temperate regions. In addition, sequences of legume-based pastures can offer benefits to crops, such
as improved soil fertility and disease break for cereal root pathogens (Jensen et al., 2012). Thirdly, a simplified
NPP0 based approach to land use footprinting has the potential to encourage excessive land use intensification
and land degradation, which is another way of increasing pressure on the earth’s land resources. These
and other issues point to the need for further development of the land use footprint indicator.
5. Conclusion
Land resources are currently under stress, and with a world population increasing toward 9 billion inhabitants,
the increased demand for food, fibre, and increasingly biofuel, must be met in ways which do not lead
to continuing loss of natural ecosystems and expanding land degradation. An LCA-based land use footprint
indicator could help in understanding the incremental pressure on land resources of agri-food production
systems and consumption patterns, and enable the assessment of tradeoffs with GHG emissions and water
use. While NPP0 is an objective measure of the intrinsic productive capability of land and can be used to
improve land use assessment beyond a simple measure of land area alone, further development of the land
use footprint indicator is recommended.
6. References
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Brandão, M., Milà i Canals, L., 2012. Global characterisation factors to assess land use impacts on biotic production. Int. J. Life
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de Baan, L., Alkemade, R., Koellner, T., 2012. Land use impacts on biodiversity in LCA: a global approach. Int. J. Life Cycle Assess.
DOI 10.1007/s11367-012-0412-0.
de Haan, C., Gerber, P., Opio, C., 2010. Structural change in the livestock sector, in: Steinfeld, H., Mooney, H.A., Schneider, F.,
Neville, L.E. (Eds.), Livestock in a Changing Landscape. Island Press, London, pp. 35-66.
de Souza, D.M., Flynn, D., Koellner, T., 2012. Land use impacts on functional species diversity: proposal of characterization factors
to assess effects on ecosystem processes. Special Forum on Global Land Use Impacts on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in
LCA within the framework of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, Brussels, 17 th February 2012.
Erb, K.H., Gaube, V., Krausmann, F., Plutzar, C., Bondeau, A., Haberl, H., 2007. A comprehensive global 5 min resolution land-use
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