FABIO—The Construction of the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input–Output Model

Abstract

Harvested biomass is linked to final consumption by networks of processes and actors that convert and distribute food and nonfood goods. Achieving a sustainable resource metabolism of the economy is an overarching challenge which manifests itself in a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Modeling the physical dimensions of biomass conversion and distribution networks is essential to understanding the characteristics, drivers, and dynamics of the socio-economic biomass metabolism. In this paper, we present the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input–Output model (FABIO), a set of multiregional supply, use and input–output tables in physical units, that document the complex flows of agricultural and food products in the global economy. The model assembles FAOSTAT statistics reporting crop production, trade, and utilization in physical units, supplemented by data on technical and metabolic conversion efficiencies, into a consistent, balanced, input–output framework. FABIO covers 191 countries and 130 agriculture, food and forestry products from 1986 to 2013. The physical supply use tables offered by FABIO provide a comprehensive, transparent, and flexible structure for organizing data representing flows of materials within metabolic networks. They allow tracing of biomass flows and embodied environmental pressures along global supply chains at an unprecedented level of product and country detail and can help to answer a range of questions regarding environment, agriculture, and trade. Here we apply FABIO to the case of cropland footprints and show the evolution of consumption-based cropland demand in China, the E.U., and the U.S.A. for plant-based and livestock-based food and nonfood products.

Price Variance in Hybrid-LCA Leads to Significant Uncertainty in Carbon Footprints

“…However, one aspect which current implementations all have in common, is their reliance on product-(or service-) price information to deal with unit conversion between the physical units of PLCA databases and the monetary units in IO tables. We note that although physical input-output models are being advocated and developed (Merciai and Schmidt, 2018;Bruckner et al, 2019;Towa et al, 2020), current physical models either do not offer a complete sectoral coverage (Bruckner et al, 2019) or rely on PLCA data to determine sectoral input structures (Merciai and Schmidt, 2018), making them unsuitable for a complete hybrid database covering global supply chains.…”

Meat Consumption Does Not Explain Differences in Household Food Carbon Footprints in Japan

“…We used a subnational input-output model documenting subnational production and trade across 47 prefectures in Japan. Input-output models are a family of supply-chain databases that follow the life-cycle of all products produced in one or multiple countries through trade and transformation steps to final consumption, in flows expressed in monetary or physical units or units of embodied environmental impacts, e.g., embodied GHG emissions (for examples and to learn more about these models see Minx et al, 17 Moran and Kanemoto, 18 and Bruckner et al 19 ). We then investigated potential drivers of household food CF, including geography, income, and diet.…”

Material Hide‐and‐Seek: Looking for the Resource Savings Due to International Trade of Food Products

“…Wiedmann and Lenzen (2018) advice to extend the models for a better understanding of the local context of scarcity, risk, and vulnerability. Several efforts toward more detailed, accurate and sub‐regionally relevant footprint models were launched recently (Bruckner, Hayha, et al., 2019; Bruckner, Wood, et al., 2019).…”