Food’s environmental impacts are created by millions of diverse producers. To identify solutions that are effective under this heterogeneity, we consolidated data covering five environmental indicators; 38,700 farms; and 1600 processors, packaging types, and retailers. Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product, creating substantial mitigation opportunities. However, mitigation is complicated by trade-offs, multiple ways for producers to achieve low impacts, and interactions throughout the supply chain. Producers have limits on how far they can reduce impacts. Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change. Cumulatively, our findings support an approach where producers monitor their own impacts, flexibly meet environmental targets by choosing from multiple practices, and communicate their impacts to consumers.

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Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers

This manual presents a scientifically rigorous method to help companies understand their dependency and impact on global water resources, and offers guidance on response strategies that conserve water for industry, communities, and nature. It contains the global standard for water footprint assessment as developed and maintained by the Water Footprint Network. It covers a comprehensive set of definitions and methods for water footprint accounting. It shows how water footprints are calculated for individual processes and products, as well as for consumers, nations, and businesses. It also includes methods for water footprint sustainability assessment and a library of water footprint response options. The water footprint of a product is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured over the fully supply chain. It is a multidimensional indicator, showing water consumption volumes by source and polluted volumes by type of pollution; all components of a total water footprint are specified geographically and temporally.

/pdf/the-water-footprint-assessment-manual-setting-the-global-32uctgx0m9.pdf

The Water Footprint Assessment Manual: Setting the Global Standard

Within the context of Earth’s limited natural resources and assimilation capacity, the current environmental footprint of humankind is not sustainable. Assessing land, water, energy, material, and other footprints along supply chains is paramount in understanding the sustainability, efficiency, and equity of resource use from the perspective of producers, consumers, and government. We review current footprints and relate those to maximum sustainable levels, highlighting the need for future work on combining footprints, assessing trade-offs between them, improving computational techniques, estimating maximum sustainable footprint levels, and benchmarking efficiency of resource use. Ultimately, major transformative changes in the global economy are necessary to reduce humanity’s environmental footprint to sustainable levels

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/344/6188/1114.full.pdf

Humanity’s unsustainable environmental footprint

A Review of Footprint analysis tools for monitoring impacts on sustainability

Sustainability is nowadays accepted by all stakeholders as a guiding principle for both public policy making and corporate strategies. However, the biggest challenge for most organizations remains in the real and substantial implementation of the sustainability concept. The core of the implementation challenge is the question, how sustainability performance can be measured, especially for products and processes. This paper explores the current status of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) for products and processes. For the environmental dimension well established tools like Life Cycle Assessment are available. For the economic and social dimension, there is still need for consistent and robust indicators and methods. In addition to measuring the individual sustainability dimensions, another challenge is a comprehensive, yet understandable presentation of the results. The “Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard” and the “Life Cycle Sustainability Triangle” are presented as examples for communication tools for both experts and non expert stakeholders.

/pdf/towards-life-cycle-sustainability-assessment-58x6dr17rb.pdf

Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

Feasibility of applying the biodiversity impact assessment method BIA+: A case study on freshwater biodiversity impacts resulting from phosphorus and 1,4-DCB emitted during the biodiesel production

Water Footprint (WF) is broadly applied as a method to quantify impacts associated with the water use throughout the value chain of products, nevertheless the need for a more temporally and spatially explicit evaluation has recently been highlighted. In this paper a region specific WF inventory and midpoint impact assessment for the cotton-textile value chain in Pakistan is introduced. The locally relevant parameters are identified and included into the water consumption inventory and water availability database. The results are applied to a numerical model for the cotton cultivation. For the water consumption, the introduced region specific parameters are position on the irrigation channel, water source (distinguishing between surface and groundwater), use of the storage reservoirs and water trade between farmers for the inventory. Parameters groundwater level, and salinity and distinguishing between surface and groundwater are included into the water availability database. The calculated WF demonstrates that the separate assessment of the surface and groundwater in both inventory and impact assessment is essential on a regional level. Evaluating local conditions play the vital role for a robust quantification of the WF. Further development of the region specific impact assessment is needed in particular for the endpoint impact assessment for the areas of protection human health, ecosystems and freshwater resources.

Markus Berger

Papers

Feasibility of applying the biodiversity impact assessment method BIA+: A case study on freshwater biodiversity impacts resulting from phosphorus and 1,4-DCB emitted during the biodiesel production

Enhancing the Water Footprint Method to a Region Specific Management Tool

Zum Stand der BIM-Implementierung in der Straßenplanung