Book of Proceedings of the International Food Life Cycle Assessment Conference 2022 published

The Book of Proceedings of the International Food Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Conference 2022 has just been published. Exciting results from LCA experts from around the world were presented at the conference in Lima, Peru from October 12-15, 2022. The abstracts of the presentations have now been published. Among others, they include the contributions of corsus experts Ulrike Eberle and Nico Mumm , who presented the results of the Besseresser:innen study at the conference, in which corsus determined the environmental impact of nutrition in Germany on behalf of WWF Germany.

In a study for WWF Germany, corsus also quantified for the first time the environmental impact of nutrition in Germany in terms of water scarcity and biodiversity. In addition, scenarios were developed to determine how environmental impacts would develop if the recommendations of the Eat Lancet Commission were followed. The Eat Lancet Commission has made recommendations for eating for the good of the planet.
The conference paper by Dr. Ulrike Eberle presents how the scenarios were created and how the environmental impacts would develop. First of all, it can be stated that we eat far too much on average in Germany today. Environmental impacts could be reduced simply by reducing the quantities to a recommended level. At the same time, it could be shown that a vegetarian or vegan diet according to the recommendations of the Eat Lancel Commission would lead to significant reductions in most environmental impacts. Thus, greenhouse gas emissions, land footprint, and biodiversity impacts could be reduced to about half. Only impacts related to water scarcity would increase – mainly caused by the consumption of citrus fruits and Californian almonds.
In his contribution, Nico Mumm explains how the model was developed and, in particular, how the impacts on biodiversity and water scarcity were quantified. For the first time, corsus has developed country- and product-specific characterization factors for ecoregions to calculate impacts on biodiversity, thus contributing to the methodological discussion on impact assessment of biodiversity impacts through food production.