A Life-Cycle Approach to Characterising Environmental and Economic Impacts of Multifunctional Land-Use Systems: An Integrated Assessment in the UK

Abstract

An integrated environmental and economic assessment of land use for food, energy and timber in the UK has been performed using environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and economic Life Cycle Costing (LCC), to explore complementary sustainability aspects of alternative land uses. The environmental assessment includes impacts on climate change, ecosystem services and biodiversity, all of which include soil carbon emissions. The systems explored include all processes from cradle to farm ‘gate’. The crops assessed were wheat and oilseed rape (under both organic and conventional farming systems), Scots Pine, and willow and Miscanthus. Food crops, particularly conventional food crops, are shown to have the highest climate-changing emissions per ha, whereas energy and forestry crops show negative net emissions. To a lesser extent, the same situation applies to impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity, with carbon storage in biomass playing a larger role than carbon in soils. The energy and forestry crops in this study show an overall beneficial environmental impact, in particular due to soil carbon sequestration, making these land uses the lowest contributors to climate change. Combining this with the non-renewable CO2 emissions displaced will mean that energy crops have an even lower impact. Economically, conventional food crops present the highest costs per ha, followed by organic food crops, energy and forestry crops. Integrating the results from LCA and LCC shows that the climate impacts per monetary unit of all land uses are dominated by soil management and, in the case of food production, also by fertilisation. Taxes or incentives such as “carbon charging” will encourage changes in practice in these areas to improve the sustainability of land management, mainly by building up Soil Organic Carbon (SOC)

Greenhouse gas assessment of soybean production: implications of land use change and different cultivation systems

“…additions and mineralization of soil organic matter were identified as a major contributor to the soybean GHG balance (Brandão et al, 2010;Snyder et al, 2009;Reijnders and Huijbregts, 2008;Landis et al, 2007), since N 2 O has a high Global Warming Potential in relation to CO 2 (1 kg N 2 O is equivalent to 298 kg CO 2 eq, for a 100 year timehorizon). However, there are significant uncertainties in N 2 O emission calculations (IPCC, 2006), particularly for N 2 O emissions originating in the fraction of N lost via runoff, leaching and volatilization (Reijnders and Huijbregts, 2011).…”

Review of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment and Potential for Its Adoption at an Automotive Company

“…Two other case studies used a slimmed down approach just applying LCA and LCC to assess flooring options [78] and the effects of different crops on land use [79].…”

Economic Sustainability of Italian Greenhouse Cherry Tomato

“…Ragusa Province, despite being the primary Sicilian production area, during last ten years, showed a decrease both in terms of greenhouse tomato area (−7.3%) and harvested production (−27.4%) for several structural and commercial problems. Therefore, in order to better understand the profitability of Sicilian greenhouse cherry tomato production and determine its weaknesses, an economic analysis of farms is needed, as was done in similar studies [16][17][18][19], since economic sustainability is the most important factor for the adoption of a crop, as it ensures the farm's long-term competitiveness [20][21][22][23][24]. In this context, the aim of this paper was to analyze the economic profitability of Sicilian greenhouse cherry tomato cultivated in the Ragusa Province.…”