Embracing complexity in the assessment of environmental impacts caused by global food systems
Sometimes it is difficult to be aware of all the impacts that simple and (apparently) harmless decisions can cause. This applies to the food we eat every day. International trade has helped to make our food systems global, which means that the production, manufacture, consumption and disposal of any product could take place in different parts of the world and that environmental impacts can be extended in many geographic areas. In this way, eating chocolate bars in Europe can induce deforestation in Ghana by incentivising farmers to establish cocoa plantations or to replace previous crops with cocoa (i.e. direct land use change). As a result, the new cocoa plantations can compete for land with other crops (for instance maize), which then become displaced to other areas where they could induce deforestation again (i.e. indirect land use change).
The complex dynamics explained above make it difficult to trace and measure the environmental impacts caused along the supply chain of agriculture-based products. Due to limitations of data, time and methods, most studies separate the components of the whole supply chain into pieces and study them independently. In their recently published article, however, PhD student Claudia Paitan at the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, together with Professor Peter Verburg, start from the premise that doing so can compromise the validity of any type of environmental impact assessment and, ultimately, risks underestimating the environmental consequences of the food we eat. This is important because inaccurate studies can lead to inefficient or counterproductive policy actions and threaten the implementation of sustainability goals within agricultural supply chains. The authors contribute to the discussion on the methodological challenges of assessing the direct and indirect environmental impacts caused by global food systems.
But coming up with better options is no easy task. To structure their analysis, they used the telecoupling framework presented by Jack Liu and colleagues (Liu et al., 2013). The framework clearly describes how the interaction of two or more socio-ecological systems (such as the ones involved in agricultural supply chains) can give rise to indirect impacts (so-called spillovers) beyond the geographic limits of the systems involved (the trading countries) and thus generate a chain of positive or negative impacts in other systems around the world. In their article, they focus on agricultural systems because it is the largest contributor to global land use change (Foley et al., 2005).
Their study shows that, although there is a great variety of methods available to assess the impacts caused by different components of agricultural supply chains, existing methods are not able to account for the direct and indirect environmental impacts caused by the supply chain of agricultural products in a spatially explicit manner. They conclude that using hybrid models that combine the strengths of different methods is a promising path to assess the environmental impacts caused by agricultural supply chains more comprehensively. The next challenge is to apply their recommendations in an empirical study, so there is no doubt that this is just the beginning of a fascinating research journey.
The article is titled “Methods to Assess the Impacts and Indirect Land Use Change Caused by Telecoupled Agricultural Supply Chains: A Review” and is part of the special issue “Through the Lens of Telecoupling: New Perspectives for Global Sustainability” from the scientific journal Sustainability. It is open access and can be accessed through the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/4/1162
You can read more about Claudia’s project here: http://coupled-itn.eu/research-projects/esr-07/. The project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 765408.
References
Foley, J. A., Defries, R., Asner, G. P., Barford, C., Bonan, G., Carpenter, S. R., … Snyder, P. K. (2005). Global Consequences of Land Use. Science, 309(5734), 570–574. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1111772
Liu, J., Hull, V., Batistella, M., Defries, R., Dietz, T., Fu, F., … Zhu, C. (2013). Framing Sustainability in a Telecoupled World. Ecology and Society, 18(2), 26. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05873-180226
Parra Paitan, C., & Verburg, P. (2019). Methods to Assess the Impacts and Indirect Land Use Change Caused by Telecoupled Agricultural Supply Chains: A Review. Sustainability, 11(4), 1162. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11041162
Originally published at coupled-itn.eu on 01 March 2019.
