Life cycle assessment as a prospective tool for sustainable agriculture and food planning at a local level

Abstract

Owing to the far-reaching environmental consequences of agriculture and food systems, such as their contribution to climate change, there is an urgent need to reduce their impact. International and national governments set sustainability targets and implement corresponding measures. Nevertheless, critics of the globalized system claim that a territorial administrative scale is better suited to address sustainability issues. Yet, at the sub-national level, local authorities rarely apply a systemic environmental assessment to enhance their action plans. This paper employs a territorial life cycle assessment methodology to improve local environmental agri-food planning. The objective is to identify significant direct and indirect environmental hotspots, their origins, and formulate effective mitigation strategies. The methodology is applied to the administrative department of Finistere, a strategic agricultural region in North-Western France. Multiple environmental criteria including climate change, fossil resource scarcity, toxicity, and land use are modeled. The findings reveal that the primary environmental hotspots of the studied local food system arise from indirect sources, such as livestock feed or diesel consumption. Livestock reduction and organic farming conversion emerge as the most environmentally efficient strategies, resulting in a 25% decrease in the climate change indicator. However, the overall modeled impact reduction is insufficient following national objectives and remains limited for the land use indicator. These results highlight the innovative application of life cycle assessment led at a local level, offering insights for the further advancement of systematic and prospective local agri-food assessment. Additionally, they provide guidance for local authorities to enhance the sustainability of planning strategies.