Peeling the orange: Delving into life cycle indicators for water footprint, ecosystem services, and biodiversity for orange cultivation in Uruguay

Abstract

The relevance of certain environmental impacts on agricultural processes, such as water use and degradation, biodiversity loss, and effects on ecosystem services, is widely recognized by the Sustainable Development Goals. However, agricultural Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), among others, those on citrus fruits, often neglect or only partially address these impacts. This study seeks to fill this gap by evaluating these newly developed impact categories using orange cultivation in Uruguay as a case study. Updated and regionalized methods based on both midpoint and endpoint indicators are applied in a comprehensive cradle-to-farm gate analysis using mass and area functional units. The assessment specifically evaluates the effects of water consumption and degradation, land occupation on ecosystem services across five distinct potentials, as well as the impacts on biodiversity of both land use and those associated with resource use and pollutant emissions. Irrigation is the main contributor to water consumption-related impacts, with scores of 1545.2 m³ eq.·ha⁻¹ and 88.5 m³ eq.·tonne⁻¹ for blue water scarcity. As for water degradation, the main hotspots are fertilizers on-field emissions and production, along with that of copper oxides and the maritime transport of inputs. The pollution deprivation potential is quantified, obtaining scores of 1.1 · 10⁻² m³·ha⁻¹ and 5.7 · 10⁻⁴ m³·tonne⁻¹. Land occupation for orange cultivation is the critical stage for ecosystem services loss — although it positively affects groundwater regeneration. The scores for biodiversity loss due to land occupation are 4.4 · 10⁻⁷ PDF·ha⁻¹ and 2.6 · 10⁻⁸ PDF·tonne⁻¹. Regarding non-land use-related impacts on biodiversity loss, input transportation stands out due to its significant contribution to terrestrial ecotoxicity. Based on the results, suggested management practices are put forth to mitigate the environmental impacts. Furthermore, areas for potential methodological enhancement are identified. This study provides the first application of recently developed environmental indicators for agricultural LCAs to citrus fruit cultivation, aiming to boost the development of more comprehensive studies that consider critical environmental aspects of agricultural systems.