The carbon footprint of cold chain food flows in the United States

Wang, Junren; Karakoc, Deniz Berfin; Konar, Megan

doi:10.1088/2634-4505/ac676d

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The network is also based on great-circle distances rather than actual road distances. Recent work by Wang et al 61 addressed this limitation through the use of roadway miles between counties when modeling cold-chain flows, which can be used in future studies. Our model still aids in the understanding of the role of sourcing and spatial irrigation patterns on the relative consumption-based water footprints.…”

Section: ■ Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Consumption-Based Accounting for Tracing Virtual Water Flows Associated with Beef Supply Chains in the United States

Ostroski

Lagos

Prokopyev

et al. 2022

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Enhancing the environmental sustainability of food systems requires an understanding of both production- and consumption-based impacts. As food supply chains become increasingly complex and connected, they also present a unique context in which to understand the environmental impacts of consumption. This is critical for understanding the disconnect between production- and consumption-based impacts of food systems and ultimately designing, evaluating, and implementing interventions for improving security, resilience, and sustainability of food systems. Using publicly available datasets and an optimization-based framework, we present a county-to-county level network model of beef supply chains in the United States. The model is used to connect and attribute the consumption-based impacts of beef consumption to production in distant locations, specifically focusing on water-based impacts. We specifically focus on the beef system because of its importance in the diet of U.S. consumers and in environmental sustainability discourse. The findings from this work show the spatial disconnect between the consumption and production counties with approximately 22 billion m3 of blue virtual water being transferred for the year 2017, mainly from the northern and southern plains toward the coasts. These results highlight the importance of understanding environmental impacts from both production and consumption perspectives.

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Section: ■ Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The network is also based on great-circle distances rather than actual road distances. Recent work by Wang et al . addressed this limitation through the use of roadway miles between counties when modeling cold-chain flows, which can be used in future studies.…”

Section: Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consumption-Based Accounting for Tracing Virtual Water Flows Associated with Beef Supply Chains in the United States

Ostroski

Lagos

Prokopyev

et al. 2022

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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show abstract

“…Different models have different applications, with many models supporting benchmarking and simulation of possible future scenarios. Various data gathering, handling (e.g., dimensionality reduction), and modeling approaches are represented in this focus issue, including regression [3] and other machine learning methods for classification [10,11], principal component analysis [12,13], participatory action research [8], differential equations representing underlying physical science [14], and other building-scale models [14][15][16]. Research models and analyses, combined with multi-scale digital applications [7], can translate impacts from large-scale infrastructure operations (e.g., CO 2 emissions from electricity generation) to the end-use scale [6,16], though there are often overlapping spatial scales for resources and governance.…”

Section: Synthesis Of the Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding resource consumption and sustainability in the built environment

Stillwell¹,

Cominola²,

Beal³

2023

Environ. Res.: Infrastruct. Sustain.

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The built environment and the communities that contribute to its infrastructure, services, and systems are important aspects of human life. As urbanization increases, time spent indoors also increases, with urban residents spending most of their time indoors. This indoor lifestyle concentrates the effects of water, energy, and food consumption in the built environment, with local, regional, and global implications for interconnected resources and their supply chains. As such, resource consumption in the built environment has sustainability implications, especially with increasing populations and living standards. This focus issue, ‘Resource Consumption and Sustainability in the Built Environment’, examines infrastructure and sustainability from many perspectives. The articles investigate water, energy, and/or food consumption across various scales, ranging from a single household to nationwide supply chains to global climate models. Each paper in this issue considers essential elements of context, since water, energy, and food have local and global sustainability considerations, along with multi-sector dependencies within urban metabolism. Digital technologies, data, and modeling approaches are opening new opportunities for better monitoring and understanding of the built environment. In an uncertain future, understanding resource consumption in the built environment and its implications for the environment and society is a critical aspect of overall human health and well-being. In-depth knowledge of the dynamics shaping the built environment is paramount to supporting adaptive infrastructure planning and management, including supply and demand interventions to help cities and communities become climate neutral while increasing equity in access and affordability of resources and services.

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“…water, carbon, etc) in future work. However, it is important to note that our flow database would help to resolve transport footprints, which are considerably smaller than production footprints [27], but could still be large and comparable to the emissions of some nations [55]. Another important avenue of future research is to determine any vulnerabilities that may exist in this bilateral agri-food trade network.…”

Section: Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Climate change will alter domestic agricultural supply chains in both countries [23,24], making it essential to understand current infrastructure investment requirements. There is a rich literature on the environmental footprints of trade within and between the US and China [25][26][27], which could be refined in future work with spatially resolved trade information between the two countries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially detailed agricultural and food trade between China and the United States

Pandit

Karakoc

Konar

2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

Self Cite

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The United States and China are key nations in global agricultural and food trade. They share a complex bilateral agri-food trade network in which disruptions could have a global ripple effect. Yet, we do not understand the spatially resolved connections in the bilateral US-China agri-food trade. In this study, we estimate the bilateral agri-food trade between Chinese provinces and U.S. states and counties. First, we estimate bilateral imports and exports of agri-food commodities for provinces and states. Second, we model link-level connections between provinces and states/counties. To do this, we develop a novel algorithm that integrates a variety of national and international databases for the year 2017, including trade data from the US Census Bureau, the US Freight Analysis Framework database, and Multi-Regional Input-Output tables for China. We then adapt the Food Flow Model for inter-county agri-food movements within the US to estimate bilateral trade through port counties. We estimate 15,469 and 713,806 link-level connections at the state-province and county-province resolution, respectively, and identify core nodes in the bilateral agri-food trade network. Our results provide a spatially detailed mapping of the US-China bilateral agri-food trade, which may enable future research and inform decision-makers.

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The carbon footprint of cold chain food flows in the United States

Cited by 5 publications

References 51 publications

Consumption-Based Accounting for Tracing Virtual Water Flows Associated with Beef Supply Chains in the United States

Consumption-Based Accounting for Tracing Virtual Water Flows Associated with Beef Supply Chains in the United States

Understanding resource consumption and sustainability in the built environment

Spatially detailed agricultural and food trade between China and the United States

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