Life Cycle Assessment of Agri-Food Products

Dear Colleagues,

Food is a necessity for life. Food products are also among the main drivers of environmental change. Agriculture plays a significant role, for example, on climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and water management. Farmers are frequently also the first affected by the impacts of environmental degradation. One of the key challenges of our time is therefore to feed an expanding global population while adapting to and mitigating new environmental stresses. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a traditional choice for quantifying the impacts of specific products and entire diets on the environment and assessing options for improvement. LCA uses a holistic perspective by focusing on entire food production chains that is particularly relevant for the goal of answering the sustainability challenges of the sector. The goal of this Special Issue is to assess the state-of-the art for agri-food LCA, leveraging its strengths to provide meaningful answers regarding the sustainability of agri-food production practices, while at the same time improving some of its methodological limitations.

This Special Issue welcomes:

• Applied small-scale LCA studies of agri-food systems;
• In particular, studies applying life cycle thinking for new or emerging production systems (urban agriculture, meat substitutes, etc.);
• Large-scale sustainability assessments of diets;
• Applications of novel indicators, new methods, and tools for expanding the scope of existing sustainability evaluations of food products (application or development of novel characterization factors for land use, biodiversity or ecosystem services, new databases, software, etc.);
• New methodological insights regarding the influence of assumptions and LCA modeling approaches on results (consequential vs. attributional analyses, the role of functional units, etc.);
• Evaluations of the role of uncertainty in agri-food results;
• Applications of innovative approaches to improve LCA modelling (e.g., using process-based models in the construction of inventories or impact assessment models; remote sensing for data collection in LCA studies; applications of machine learning in agri-food LCA);
• Reviews of agri-food LCA studies;
• Other topics that fit within the general scope of agri-food LCA.

Prof. Dr. Ricardo Teixeira
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Industrial ecology
• Agriculture
• Life cycle impact assessment
• Sustainable production and consumption