Dear colleagues,
reducing emissions intensity of agricultural products is important for climate change mitigation in agriculture. But it is not the whole story. We need a food systems approach and mitigation in agriculture needs to address the consumption side as well.
When reducing food wastage and animal sourced food, we gain the room needed for improvements along a wide range of sustainability indicators besides greenhouse gas emissions. These improvements can then be delivered by production systems such as organic agriculture, grass-fed ruminants or pigs and poultry fed on by-products only, albeit their yields are lower and their GHG emissions per kg product may be higher.
A combination of such complementary strategies then results in food systems with lower overall land use and lower greenhouse gas emissions albeit the partly lower yields and higher emissions intensities of the underlying practices.
For more on this, please refer to the fcrn-post (http://www.fcrn.org.uk/
Best regards, Adrian.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Adrian Muller
Senior Researcher
Department of Environmental Systems Science
Institute for Environmental Decisions IED
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland
and
Department of Socioeconomics
Research Institute of Organic Agriculture FiBL, Switzerland
email: amueller@env.ethz.ch
1) Muller, A., Schader, C., El-Hage Scialabba, N., Hecht, J., Isensee, A., Erb, K.-H., Smith, P., Klocke, K., Leiber, F., Stolze, M. and Niggli, U., 2017, Strategies for feeding the world more sustainably with organic agriculture, Nature Communications 8:1290 | DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01410-w; http://nature.com/articles/
Abstract: Organic agriculture is proposed as a promising approach to achieving sustainable food systems, but its feasibility is also contested. We use a food systems model that addresses agronomic characteristics of organic agriculture to analyse the role that organic agriculture could play in sustainable food systems. Here we show, that a 100% conversion to organic agriculture needs more land than conventional agriculture but reduces N-surplus and pesticide use. However, in combination with reductions of food wastage and food-competing feed from arable land, with correspondingly reduced production and consumption of animal products, land use under organic agriculture remains below the reference scenario. Other indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions also improve, but adequate nitrogen supply is challenging. Besides focusing on production, sustainable food systems need to address waste, crop-grass-livestock interdependencies and human consumption. None of the corresponding strategies needs full implementation and their combined partial implementation delivers a more sustainable food future.
2) Schader, C., Muller, A., El-Hage Scialabba, N., Hecht, J., Isensee, A., Erb, K.-H., Smith, P., Makkar, H.P.S., Klocke, K., Leiber, F., Schwegler, P., Stolze, M. and Niggli, U., 2015, Impacts of feeding less food-competing feedstuffs to livestock on global food system sustainability, Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12: 20150891; http://rsif.
Abstract: Increasing efficiency in livestock production and reducing the share of animal products in human consumption are two strategies to curb the adverse environmental impacts of the livestock sector. Here, we explore the room for sustainable livestock production by modelling the impacts and constraints of a third strategy in which livestock feed components that compete with direct human food crop production are reduced. Thus, in the outmost scenario, animals are fed only from grassland and by-products from food production. We show that this strategy could provide sufficient food (equal amounts of human-digestible energy and a similar protein/calorie ratio as in the reference scenario for 2050) and reduce environmental impacts compared with the reference scenario (in the most extreme case of zero human-edible concentrate feed: greenhouse gas emissions −18%; arable land occupation −26%, N-surplus −46%; P-surplus −40%; non-renewable energy use −36%, pesticide use intensity −22%, freshwater use −21%, soil erosion potential −12%). These results occur despite the fact that environmental efficiency of livestock production is reduced compared with the reference scenario, which is the consequence of the grassland-based feed for ruminants and the less optimal feeding rations based on by-products for non-ruminants. This apparent contradiction results from considerable reductions of animal products in human diets (protein intake per capita from livestock products reduced by 71%). We show that such a strategy focusing on feed components which do not compete with direct human food consumption offers a viable complement to strategies focusing on increased efficiency in production or reduced shares of animal products in consumption.
If you are interested in the discussion on how to frame the needed changes on the consumption side on asocietal level, then may have a look at the following paper as well:
3) Muller, A., Huppenbauer, M., 2016, Sufficiency, liberal societies and environmental policy in the face of planetary boundaries, Gaia 25(2): 105-109, http://www.ingentaconnect.com/
Abstract: Sufficiency is not a goal of environmental policy-making as is efficiency. In view of the planetary boundaries, this paper instead proposes that sufficiency should amend the notion of liberal society. The classic vision of liberal societies has been based on the core values of individual freedom, the no-harm principle and social justice together with the related virtues of courage, prudence and justice. By adding sufficiency, we introduce a fourth core value, one which is necessary for dealing with planetary boundaries. Temperance, the virtue linked to sufficiency, becomes an important part of this.
