Reconciling Life Cycle Environmental Impacts with Ecosystem Services: A Management Perspective on Agricultural Land Use

Abstract

Impacts on ecosystem services that are related to agricultural land use greatly differ depending on management practices employed. This study aimed to reveal issues associated with evaluating ecosystem services related to land use at the management level during life cycle assessment (LCA) and to consider future challenges. Firstly, a relationship between agricultural ecosystem services and management practices was outlined. Then, a survey was performed to disclose the current status of assessment of impact of land use in agricultural LCA case studies that compared between different management practices. In addition, this study also investigated how management practices have been differently considered by factors that characterize ecosystem services that are related to land use. The results show that the number of agricultural LCA cases where land use impacts instead of land areas were assessed was still small. The results of limited LCA case studies, which using factors could differentiate between various management practices, suggest that although organic farming methods have been employed over large land areas, lower impact may be caused by agricultural land use. For factors developed in existing research, services related to soil quality, and some of the regulatory services were considered, those unique to agriculture were missing. Although most of factors were calculated at levels of intensity or land use type, some of them were based on a process-based model that could consider management practices. In the future, factors that characterize the impacts of land use on ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and erosion prevention, will need to be calculated at the management level. For ecosystem services, such as habitat conservation and pollination, further efforts in accumulating evaluation case studies that collect and accumulate foreground data are important.

The Ecological Value of Typical Agricultural Products: An Emergy-Based Life-Cycle Assessment Framework

“…Objective ecological value is mainly focused on the impact of agricultural land reduction on ecosystem services (Macfadyen et al, 2012;Marrero et al, 2016;Tang et al, 2018) as well as the relationship between food production and ecosystem services (Gordon et al, 2010;Barral et al, 2020). However, few scholars have discussed the ecological value of agriculture and the realization of the ecological value of agricultural production.…”

Integration of environment and nutrition in life cycle assessment of food Items: opportunities and challenges

“…The relevance of assessing life cycle impacts on ES is nowadays well documented by numerous studies characterizing impacts on ecosystem processes and functions, such as increase/decrease in carbon sequestration (Ingram et al, 2018), loss/gain in pollination services (Arzoumanidis et al, 2021), changes in soil quality (Tang et al, 2018), etc. It is worth noting that most of the literature on ES-LCA also focuses on topics related to agricultural and food systems.…”

An Integrated Approach to Determining the Capacity of Ecosystems to Supply Ecosystem Services into Life Cycle Assessment for a Carbon Capture System

“…In this sense, this proposal differs from another emerging approach that considers the ecosystem services issue in LCA [85][86][87], but it is subordinate to the FU model, as it excludes the metabolic patterns of the consumption and environmental load of the process on other time scales. Moreover, the proposed emerging approach does not provide flow data to determine whether the metabolic patterns of PS can affect (how and why) the biophysical constraints under which a local territory may have to provide ecosystem services.…”