Developing and delivering environmental Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of agricultural systems (IS0222)
Title: Developing and delivering environmental Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of agricultural systems (IS0222)
Contact: Dr Adrian Williams
Email: adrian.williams@cranfield.ac.uk
Client: DEFRA
Background:
Previous work developed working models of the Life Cycle Inventories of 10 major agricultural and horticultural commodities (www.agrilca.org). This project builds on this capability. It provides the active support, maintenance, further development and use of LCA methods with the broad purpose of helping to improve the quality of environmental assessment and decision making in the agricultural and horticultural sectors.
The project:
The objectives are:
1. Sustain and develop the scientific and technical basis for the delivery of LCA knowledge and guidance to decision makers in the rural and agricultural sectors.
2. Provide a continuing development of data and techniques which enable widespread use of LCA methods by stakeholders in the rural and agricultural sector.
3. Promote the environmental analysis and continual improvement of agricultural production methods.
4. Develop operational research models of agricultural and related environmental systems which accurately describe the behaviour of systems in diverse circumstances in order to improve the delivery of scientific knowledge to individual decision makers in the rural and agricultural sectors.
5. Provide a centre of scientific excellence in the application of LCA to agricultural systems.
In order to achieve these objectives, the project will:
- Promote, support and develop the delivery of the LCA tool originally developed under Defra project IS0205, particularly in response to end-user requirements.
- Develop the tool to consider an inventory of a UK basket of agricultural goods and services.
- Develop the tool to enable individual farm businesses to evaluate their performance.
- Disaggregate the LC Inventory to show how environmental impacts vary according to spatially and regionally variable factors, such as rainfall, soil type, hill-slope, temperature, or type of farm.
- Seek to better characterise functional relationships and incorporate this new knowledge into the existing models.
- Develop and extend systems for whole-farm environmental assessment and optimisation, and for non-food production systems, including biofuels and waste management.
- Produce a set of tools and approaches that enable the GHG emissions of farm businesses or groups of farm businesses to be easily audited.
Accessing the model:
The commodity model is written in Microsoft Excel. We will distribute updates as necessary.
Main findings:
In Progress
Publications:
Williams, A.G., Audsley, E. & Sandars, D.L. (2006) Final report to Defra on project ISO205: Determining the environmental burdens and resource use in the production of agricultural and horticultural commodities. London: Defra.
