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Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers
The global impacts of food production
Food is produced and processed by millions of farmers and intermediaries globally, with substantial associated environmental costs. Given the heterogeneity of producers, what is the best way to reduce food's environmental impacts? Poore and Nemecek consolidated data on the multiple environmental impacts of ∼38,000 farms producing 40 different agricultural goods around the world in a meta-analysis comparing various types of food production systems. The environmental cost of producing the same goods can be highly variable. However, this heterogeneity creates opportunities to target the small numbers of producers that have the most impact.
Science, this issue p. 987
Abstract
Food’s environmental impacts are created by millions of diverse producers. To identify solutions that are effective under this heterogeneity, we consolidated data covering five environmental indicators; 38,700 farms; and 1600 processors, packaging types, and retailers. Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product, creating substantial mitigation opportunities. However, mitigation is complicated by trade-offs, multiple ways for producers to achieve low impacts, and interactions throughout the supply chain. Producers have limits on how far they can reduce impacts. Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change. Cumulatively, our findings support an approach where producers monitor their own impacts, flexibly meet environmental targets by choosing from multiple practices, and communicate their impacts to consumers.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S14
Tables S1 to S17
Data S1 and S2
Resources
References and Notes
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Science
Volume 360 | Issue 6392
1 June 2018
1 June 2018
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Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 5 October 2017
Resubmitted: 8 December 2017
Accepted: 17 April 2018
Published in print: 1 June 2018
Acknowledgments
We thank the many researchers who provided us with additional data, acknowledged in data S1. We are grateful to R. Grenyer, P. Smith, E. J. Milner-Gulland, C. Godfray, G. Gaillard, L. de Baan, Y. Malhi, D. Thomas, K. Javanaud, and K. Afemikhe for comments on the manuscript and Tyana for illustrations. Funding: This work was unfunded. Author contributions: J.P. conducted the analysis and wrote the manuscript. J.P. and T.N. contributed to the study design and data interpretation and reviewed the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: A Microsoft Excel file allowing full replication of this analysis, containing all original and recalculated data, has been deposited in the Oxford University Research Archive (doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:0z9MYbMyZ).
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RE: Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers
This article, both in its database and its conclusions, totally ignores the vital role of livestock for the life and livelihoods of the people living in the non-arable parts of the world. Without livestock large parts of the world wold become uninhabitable. Please see http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1160
In addition, one wonders about the usefulness of "land use" as indicator for judging the environmental impact of a food production strategy. Applying this indicator to livestock production would give preference to intensive and factory animal farming over extensive herding.