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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Integrating ecosystem services in the life cycle assessments of meats of different species

Résumé

The impact of meat production, as evaluated from life cycle assessment (LCA), is dependent on livestock species. To produce one kg of meat, energy consumption and CO2-eq emissions increase from chicken to pork, and from pork to beef, partly because of feed efficiency differences. Beef production has thus the highest impact according to LCA but it can also be beneficial to ecosystem services (ES), if its feeding system involves grasslands. To integrate these aspects, a method has been proposed to allocate LCA impacts between the strictly productive activities, i.e. provisioning ES (PES), and regulating ES (RES). The method uses allocation factors, calculated based on available matrices of ES scores, to assess the relative weights of PES and RES in ES bundles. The method has been applied to compare organic and conventional crops and here we apply it to the production of 1 kg of chicken, pork and grass-based beef. In this aim, we modified the method to account for the share of croplands and grasslands in feeding systems. Without allocation, the differences in LCA impact between chicken and beef along the species gradient are 2.5 times higher for energy (~20 MJ/kg to ~50 MJ/kg), and six times higher for CO2-eq (~5 to ~30 kg CO2-eq/kg). With allocation according to the PES factors, the energy gradient is modified with beef having the lowest impact (14 MJ/kg), and pork the highest (20 MJ/kg). The CO2-eq gradient is not modified, but the difference of impact is reduced to two times (4 to 8 kg CO2-eq/kg). There are thus more or less important differences that correspond to LCA impacts allocated to the supply of RES. Our results do not mean that beef impact is lower that currently assessed, but that beef production can also contributes to balanced ES bundles in farming landscapes.
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Dates et versions

hal-04163786 , version 1 (17-07-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04163786 , version 1

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Frédéric Joly, Philip Roche, Jo Dewulf. Integrating ecosystem services in the life cycle assessments of meats of different species. 4th ESP Europe Conference, Ecosystem services Partnership, Oct 2022, Heraklion, Greece. ⟨hal-04163786⟩
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