SummaryThis article describes the integration of life-cycle assessment methods with a new input-output model of the world economy to analyze the environmental and economic implications of alternative future diets. The article reviews findings by industrial ecologists about the energy and land required for the production and consumption of alternative foods and diets in several European countries. It also reviews attributes of foods and diets identified by nutritionists as reducing the risks of obesity and major chronic diseases related to the diets of the affluent. The predominantly plant-based Mediterranean-type diet emerges as a dietary scenario that could satisfy both sets of concerns. The likely implications for agriculture and for farm policies of a shift toward this diet from the current average diet in the United States are discussed and shown to be substantial. The one-country studies reviewed in the article provide substantial insights into the potential ramifications of dietary change. Many of the limitations of these studies could be overcome by conducting the analysis in a global framework that represented the relationships among consumption, production, and trade and the physical constraints within which they operate. Analysis of the environmental and economic implications of alternative scenarios describing healthy diets can help stimulate more intensive dialogue, debate, and action among the interested parties; such analysis can both benefit from and contribute to initiatives such as the World Health Organization's global strategy on diet and health, which intends to enlist the support of governments, corporations, and civil society.
Industrial ecology will need to develop fundamentally new approaches to reducing, reusing, and recycling wastes. Industrial ecology will also require an analytic framework for examining the implications for the economic system as a whole of each potential web of industrial changes. A suitable framework is furnished by structural economics, which situates the economy within the physical world. This approach is based on dynamic analysis rather than static concepts of equilibrium, and optimization assumptions are used selectively rather than as the general solution mechanism. Input-output economics, an important formal model within structural economics, can trace the stocks and flows of energy and other materials from extraction through production and consumption to recycling or disposal. An input-output computation, including wastes, is presented; it illustrates the separate but integrated analysis of physical stocks and flows and of prices and costs. This paper also describes the major advances that have been made in the last decade in the extension of input-output economics to address increasingly complex questions, notably the fully dynamic physical/price/income model and the engineering/input-output data base. Economists need to be able to assess the costs of cleaning up and to develop incentive schemes to increase the likelihood this will happen. To do this, economists need to take on the difficult "how" questions that concern industrial ecologists since the cost, and indeed the wider implications, of cleaning up depends upon how it is done. Structural economics, and modern input-output models and data bases, in particular, can help meet this challenge.
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