Search

Biobased chemicals, crucial for the net-zero chemical industry, rely on lignocellulose residues as a major feedstock. However, its availability and environmental impacts vary greatly across regions. By 2050, we estimate that 3.0-5.2 Gt of these residues will be available from the global forest and agricultural sectors, with key contributions from Brazil, China, India, and the United States. This supply satisfies the growing global feedstock demands for plastics when used efficiently. Forest residues have 84% lower climate change impacts than agricultural residues on average globally but double the land-use-related biodiversity loss. Biobased plastics may reduce climate change impacts relative to fossil-based alternatives but are insufficient to fulfill net-zero targets. In addition, they pose greater challenges in terms of biodiversity loss and water stress. Avoiding feedstock sourcing from biodiversity-rich areas could halve lignocellulose residues-related biodiversity loss without significantly compromising availability. Improvements in region-specific feedstock sourcing, agricultural management and biomass utilization technologies are warranted for transitioning toward a sustainable chemical industry.

This study considers the life cycle impacts of land use on biodiversity and ecosystem services associated with the production of a ubiquitous food type: breakfast cereals. For biodiversity, the impacts on five taxonomic groups have been assessed: mammals, birds, vascular plants, amphibians and reptiles. For ecosystem services, the potential loss in the following ecosystem services of soil has been considered: biotic production, erosion resistance, groundwater regeneration, infiltration and physicochemical filtration. The findings indicate that the main hotspot for the biodiversity loss is cocoa cultivation for all taxonomic groups, with a contribution of 27-67%. Cocoa is also a major contributor (35%) to the loss of biotic production, while rice is the largest contributor to erosion (34%), reduction in groundwater replenishment (43%) and physiochemical filtration (23%). Corn is the main cause of the infiltration reduction, accounting for 44% of the impact. Unlike the biodiversity impacts, which are almost entirely caused by agricultural activities, non-agricultural land use occurring in other life cycle stages (transport, packaging and manufacturing), has significant contribution to the reductions in groundwater replenishment and infiltration. The impacts on ecosystem services are almost entirely driven by land occupation, while the biodiversity impacts are caused by both land use change and occupation. The identification of cocoa as the main hotspot is unexpected as it is used only in very small quantities (<5% by mass) in breakfast cereals. Its high contribution to the impacts is partly due to the land use change in the ecoregion of the Eastern Guinean forests, which are home to a relatively large number of endemic species. The paper also discusses the limitations of the impact assessment methods for evaluating the biodiversity and ecosystem services and highlights the need for further development of indicators and methods to assess the land use impacts in life cycle assessment., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Anthropogenic land use to produce commodities for human consumption is the major driver of global biodiversity loss. Synergistic collaboration between producers and consumers in needed to halt this trend. In this study, we calculate species loss on 5 min × 5 min grid level and per country due to global agriculture, pasture and forestry by combining high-resolution land use data with countryside species area relationship for mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles. Results show that pasture was the primary driver of biodiversity loss in Madagascar, China and Brazil, while forest land use contributed the most to species loss in DR Congo and Indonesia. Combined with the yield data, we quantified the biodiversity impacts of 1 m(3) of roundwood produced in 139 countries, concluding that tropical countries with low timber yield and a large presence of vulnerable species suffer the highest impact. We also calculated impacts per kg for 160 crops grown in different countries and linked it with FAO food trade data to assess the biodiversity impacts embodied in Swiss food imports. We found that more than 95% of Swiss consumption impacts rest abroad with cocoa, coffee and palm oil imports being responsible for majority of damage.

Addressing biodiversity impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) has recently been significantly improved. Advances include the consideration of several taxa, consideration of vulnerability of species and ecosystems, global coverage and spatial differentiation. To allow a comparison of biodiversity impacts of different stressors (e.g., land and water use), consistent approaches for assessing and aggregating biodiversity impacts across taxa are needed. We propose four different options for aggregating impacts across taxa and stressors: equal weight for species, equal weight for taxa and two options with special consideration of species' vulnerability. We apply the aggregation options to a case study of coffee, tea and sugarcane production in Kenya for the production of 1 kg of crop. The ranking between stressors (land vs water use) within each crop and also of the overall impact between crops (coffee>sugarcane>tea) remained the same when applying the different aggregation options. Inclusion of the vulnerability of species had significant influence on the magnitude of results, and potentially also on the spatial distribution of impacts, and should be considered.

Agricultural land use is a main driver of global biodiversity loss. The assessment of land use impacts in decision-support tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA) requires spatially explicit models, but existing approaches are either not spatially differentiated or modeled at very coarse scales (e.g., biomes or ecoregions). In this paper, we develop a high-resolution (900 m) assessment method for land use impacts on biodiversity based on habitat suitability models (HSM) of mammal species. This method considers potential land use effects on individual species, and impacts are weighted by the species' conservation status and global rarity. We illustrate the method using a case study of crop production in East Africa, but the underlying HSMs developed by the Global Mammals Assessment are available globally. We calculate impacts of three major export crops and compare the results to two previously developed methods (focusing on local and regional impacts, respectively) to assess the relevance of the methodological innovations proposed in this paper. The results highlight hotspots of product-related biodiversity impacts that help characterize the links among agricultural production, consumption, and biodiversity loss.

Comprehensive sensitivity analysis is a significant tool to interpret and improve life cycle assessment (LCA) models, but is rarely performed. Sensitivity analysis will increase in importance as inventory databases become regionalized, increasing the number of system parameters, and parametrized, adding complexity through variables and nonlinear formulas. We propose and implement a new two-step approach to sensitivity analysis. First, we identify parameters with high global sensitivities for further examination and analysis with a screening step, the method of elementary effects. Second, the more computationally intensive contribution to variance test is used to quantify the relative importance of these parameters. The two-step sensitivity test is illustrated on a regionalized, nonlinear case study of the biodiversity impacts from land use of cocoa production, including a worldwide cocoa products trade model. Our simplified trade model can be used for transformable commodities where one is assessing market shares that vary over time. In the case study, the highly uncertain characterization factors for the Ivory Coast and Ghana contributed more than 50% of variance for almost all countries and years examined. The two-step sensitivity test allows for the interpretation, understanding, and improvement of large, complex, and nonlinear LCA systems.

Crop and technology choices in agriculture, which largely define the impact of agricultural production on the environment, should be considered in agricultural development planning. A life cycle assessment of the dominant crops produced in a Peruvian coastal valley was realized, in order to establish regionalized life cycle inventories for Peruvian products and to provide the basis for a regional evaluation of the impacts of eutrophication, acidification, human toxicity, and biodiversity loss due to water use. Five scenarios for the year 2020 characterized by different crop combinations and irrigation systems were considered as development options. The results of the regional assessment showed that a business-as-usual scenario, extrapolating current trends of crop cultivation, would lead to an increase in nitrate leaching with eutrophying effects. On the other hand, scenarios of increased application of drip irrigation and of mandarin area expansion would lead to a decrease in nitrate leaching. In all scenarios the human toxicity potential would decrease slightly, while an increase in irrigation water use would benefit the biodiversity of a nearby groundwater-fed wetland. Comparisons with results from other studies confirmed the importance of regionalized life cycle inventories. The results can be used as decision support for local farmers and authorities.

Global crop production is causing pressure on water and land resources in many places. In addition to local resource management, the related environmental impacts of commodities traded along international supply chains need to be considered and managed accordingly. For this purpose, we calculate the specific water consumption and land use for the production of 160 crops and crop groups, covering most harvested mass on global cropland. We quantify indicators for land and water scarcity with high geospatial resolution. This facilitates spatially explicit crop-specific resource management and regionalized life cycle assessment of processed products. The vast cultivation of irrigated wheat, rice, cotton, maize, and sugar cane, which are major sources of food, bioenergy, and fiber, drives worldwide water scarcity. According to globally averaged production, substituting biofuel for crude oil would have a lower impact on water resources than substituting cotton for polyester. For some crops, water scarcity impacts are inversely related to land resource stress, illustrating that water consumption is often at odds with land use. On global average, maize performs better than rice and wheat in the combined land/water assessment. High spatial variability of water and land use related impacts underlines the importance of appropriate site selection for agricultural activities.