Life Cycle Assessment of agri-food systems

Just out 4 January 2022
An operational guide devoted to emerging and developing economies has just been published. The book provides recommendations based on more than ten years of scientific experience, for conducting Life Cycle Assessments of food products.
In the mango export chain, the fruit is placed in crates to avoid shocks during transport to the packing station © R. Belmin, CIRAD

In the mango export chain, the fruit is placed in crates to avoid shocks during transport to the packing station © R. Belmin, CIRAD

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the internationally recognized method to assess the environmental impacts of products and services. Its application to agrifood systems in developing or emerging contexts is recent and represents many challenges of a scientific, partnership and operational nature.

With more than 10 years of scientific and field experience, the CIRAD LCA team has worked with other internationally recognized experts to synthesize the best knowledge and approaches available to apply LCA under these conditions.

This operational guide is a useful tool for LCA practitioners; it provides best practice recommendations for LCA studies of agrifood products in developing and emerging contexts.

The book can be downloaded free of charge in EPUB and PDF formats from the Quae website.


Life Cycle Assessment of agri-food systems
Editorial coordination: C. Basset-Mens, A. Avadí, C. Bessou, I. Acosta-Alba, Y. Biard, S. Payen
Quae Editions, Dec. 2021

 

Table of contents

Part 1. Introduction

Chapter 1. LCA within developing and emerging economies
Chapter 2. The purpose of this operational guide
Chapter 3. Standards, guidelines and tools
Chapter 4. Preparation process and intended audience

Part 2. Agri-food LCA in developing and emerging contexts

Chapter 5. State of the art of agrifood LCA
Chapter 6. Specific challenges for agrifood LCA in developing and emerging contexts
Chapter 7. Established and emerging initiatives

Part 3. Overcoming the challenges for robust agrifood LCA in developing and emerging economies

Chapter 8. Co-designing the study with stakeholders
Chapter 9. Building life cycle inventories
Chapter 10. Performing impact assessment
Chapter 11. Interpreting the results for each stakeholder category

Part 4. Conclusions and moving forward
 
Part 5. Appendices

See also