SCIENCE@home

What does Life‐Cycle Assessment of agricultural products need for more meaningful inclusion of biodiversity?

F. Teillard,D. M. Souza,G. Thoma,P. Gerber,J. Finn

Published 2016 in Journal of Applied Ecology

ABSTRACT

Decision-makers increasingly use life-cycle assessment (LCA) as a tool to measure the environmental sustainability of products. LCA is of particular importance in globalized agricultural supply chains, which have environmental effects in multiple and spatially dispersed locations. Incorporation of impacts on biodiversity that arise from agricultural production systems into environmental assessment methods is an emerging area of work in LCA, and current approaches have limitations, including the need for (i) improved assessment of impacts to biodiversity associated with agricultural production, (ii) inclusion of new biodiversity indicators (e.g. conservation value, functional diversity, ecosystem services) and (iii) inclusion of previously unaccounted modelling variables that go beyond land-use impacts (e.g. climate change, water and soil quality). Synthesis and applications. Ecological models and understanding can contribute to address the limitations of current life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods in agricultural production systems and to make them more ecologically relevant. This will be necessary to ensure that biodiversity is not neglected in decision-making that relies on LCA.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2016

  • Venue

    Journal of Applied Ecology

  • Publication date

    2016-10-01

  • Fields of study

    Agricultural and Food Sciences, Business, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1111/1365-2664.12683
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-42 of 42 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-43 of 43 citing papers · Page 1 of 1