LCA in the agri-food sector: challenges, mitigation options, and recent developments

Our food system has significant impacts on the environment and dominates several of the transgressed planetary boundaries. Application of LCA in the agri-food sector faces particular challenges such as the strong dependence on natural resources, open biological systems that are difficult to control, high variability driven by complex environmental processes and numerous production units. The presentation will focus on these challenges of applying LCA to the agri-food sector as well as on the development of LCI databases and LCA tools to address them. Key findings from LCA studies of the last few decades will be highlighted, along with options for mitigating environmental impacts, and an outlook will be given on current and future developments, such as nutritional LCA and eco-labelling.