A comparison of carbon accounting tools for arable crops in the United Kingdom

Abstract

NOTICE: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Environmental Modelling & Software. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Environmental Modelling & Software, vol 46, 2013, DOI 10.1016/j.envsoft.2013 Opus: University of Bath Online Publication Store http://opus.bath.ac.uk/ This version is made available in accordance with publisher policies.Please cite only the published version using the reference above.See http://opus.bath.ac.uk/ for usage policies.Please scroll down to view the document. Abstract2 In light of concerns over climate change and the need for national inventories for greenhouse gas reporting, there has been a recent increase in interest in the 'carbon foot printing' of products. A number of LCA-based carbon reporting tools have been developed in both the agricultural and renewable energy sectors, both of which follow calculation methodologies to account for GHG emissions from arable cropping. A review was performed to compare 11 existing greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting tools produced in order to calculate emissions from arable crops, either for food or bioenergy production in the UK, and a multi-criteria-analysis was performed to test their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tools designed for farm-based accounting achieved a higher 'userfriendliness' score, however bioenergy-based tools performed better in the overall level of information provided in the results, transparency and the comprehensiveness of emission sources included in the calculations. A model dataset for UK feed wheat was used to test the GHG emissions calculated by each tool. The results showed large differences, mainly due to how greenhouse gas emissions from fertiliser manufacture and application are accounted for. Overall, the Cool Farm Tool (Hillier et al. 2011) was identified as the highest ranking tool that is currently available in the public domain. The differences in the results between the tools appear to be due to the goal and scope, the system boundaries and underlying emission factor data.Keywords: Carbon accounting; agriculture; Life cycle analysis; Greenhouse gas reporting Introduction Climate change and everyday productsConcern over world-wide climate change has led to an increased interest in identifying major sources and sinks of carbon and greenhouse gases (GHG (Whittaker et al. 2011). The RED introduces sustainability criteria that specify that areas of high carbon and biodiversity must be preserved and requires that any changes in land use due to biofuel production are accounted for. The RED states that the GHG savings from biofuels should be at least 35% before January 2017, 50% after, and 60% after January 2018 for installations that start on or after 1 January 2017. The RED specifies a GHG re...

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