Pulse Brain · Growing Health Evidence Index
Peer-reviewed

Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessment

Hayo van Der Werf, Marie Trydeman Knudsen, Christel Cederberg

Nature Sustainability · 2020

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Summary

Transitioning agriculture toward greater sustainability is vital. This Perspective argues for more-holistic consideration of organic agriculture in life cycle assessments, widely used to analyse environmental impacts. The environmental effects of agriculture and food are much discussed, with competing claims concerning the impacts of conventional and organic farming. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the method most widely used to assess environmental impacts of agricultural products. Current LCA methodology and studies tend to favour high-input intensive agricultural systems and misrepresent less intensive agroecological systems such as organic agriculture. LCA assesses agroecological systems inadequately for three reasons: (1) a lack of operational indicators for three key environmental iss

Source type
Peer-reviewed study
DOI
10.1038/s41893-020-0489-6
Catalogue ID
SNmojxd7sn-fd80sm
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