Doing more with less - Identifying opportunities for sustainable agricultural intensification with Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Sustainable intensification of agriculture is the challenge of the coming decades. For example, the United Nations state that demand for food will rise by 60% until 2020. The challenge is to produce "more crop per drop" while lowering GHG emissions and halt biodiversity loss from cropland expansion and from agrochemical pollution. The overall goal of the dissertation is to contribute to the development of policies and scientific methodologies to support sustainable agricultural intensification. Core methodology for this contribution is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. LCA is a well-established method to assess the environmental impacts of products over their complete life cycle. The first policy that required a LCA for each product batch from the producer was the EU Renewable Energy Directive. Several calculation tools were developed by market players to help farmers and processing industry to compile these LCAs. However, it was not known if a producer would get the same result from each tool when entering the same production data. In chapter 2 we make a systematic comparison between the two main tools on the market. We show that results of both tools differed up to 50% for the same production pathway. This means that producers may be able to improve their GHG balance by choosing a different tool without any actual improvements in the process. These findings show a policy gap, a regulatory gap that needs to be addressed by policy makers in order to guarantee a level playing field on the market and to create an incentive to improve the GHG performance of crop production. The findings of this thesis are of high relevance for national authorities that oversee implementing the EU renewable energy directive and in general for policy makers that would like to make a policy of this kind (LCA-policy connection). Global LCA studies on impacts of agricultural production exist, however they often do not sufficiently take site-specific conditions into account. We look in the third chapter at individual producers in Mexico to assess if and how biofuels can be produced in Mexico without aggravating water scarcity, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and avoiding indirect land-use changes.