This is the translated version of the French original by Carbon Maps' co-founder and Head of Science, Jérémie Wainstain, first published in La Jaune et La Rouge.
We need to change the way we produce food, which is currently destroying the planet. But to do so, we need to make trade-offs, which must be informed by environmental accounting. But our current tools are inadequate. So the first thing to do is to create the new accounting tools that are indispensable.
The figures are well known and chilling. Our food is destroying our planet. Globalized agriculture has been identified as a threat to 86% of endangered species, and accounts for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, 80% of deforestation and 70% of water consumption. The disappearance of insects and birds, as well as the degradation of marine ecosystems, is directly caused by the way we produce and consume our food.
We need to change the way we produce food, and it's not easy because behind these aggregate figures lie diverse and complex realities. Anyone interested in the subject of food quickly understands that there is no single solution that can be applied everywhere, and that we need to work on a case-by-case basis, depending on the region and local production strategies.
For example, eliminating livestock farming makes no sense if you want to develop organic crops: organic farming needs animals to produce organic fertilizers. Reducing irrigation is only really worthwhile in water-stressed areas. As for relocalizing production, a mantra we often hear as a solution to everything, this obviously presupposes that we can produce locally, which raises questions in France for chocolate, coffee or orange juice, or more dramatically in Egypt or Algeria for wheat.
It is equally naïve to hope that we can reduce all environmental impacts at once. The interdependence of the carbon, nitrogen and water cycles in living ecosystems means that we have to arbitrate between carbon, methane, animal welfare, water resources, soil health and biodiversity: these indicators cannot all be optimized at once, and must be adjusted according to the territory.
It's naïve to hope to reduce all environmental impacts at once and at the same time.
If, for example, we seek to decarbonize agriculture by focusing solely on the GHG emissions indicator, we are de facto inviting it to resemble a clean food factory, like a farm of 100,000 cows enclosed day and night that minimizes carbon emissions per liter of milk. But what about animal welfare? On the other hand, if we only seek to enhance biodiversity, i.e. eliminate all pesticides and let nature reclaim its rights, we're steering agriculture towards living, enslaved systems that are unlikely to be very productive. But what about our food sovereignty?
Let's forget any simplistic temptations: trade-offs between biodiversity, GHG emissions, productivity, but also water resources, soil health and animal welfare, are and will be inevitable. The future of livestock farming in Europe will depend on these choices. The same goes for the future of organic farming. All these trade-offs are complex and political, and they will have a cost. They also raise the question of how to finance the ecological transition of agriculture, and even its economic model, and how to share risks and value in a world of increasingly limited fossil resources.
The fact remains that, in order to arbitrate these choices and finance the transition or remunerate farmers for their efforts, we must first have robust and reproducible environmental accounting bases, enabling us to ensure a sufficient level of confidence to be able to invest, steer and monitor results, without fearing surprises or accusations of greenwashing. While we know how to account for the environmental footprint of the secondary sector thanks to the tried-and-tested methodology of LCA (product life-cycle analysis, well-suited to factory production), accounting for the environmental impact of agriculture is a far more arduous task, due to the specific nature of the measurement indicators, and their local and systemic character.
The indicators needed to measure the impact of agriculture are far more varied than those for factory production, where pollutants and waste can easily be listed. What impacts should be counted, for example, to assess the pressure on biodiversity? Should we focus on terrestrial biodiversity (rodents), underground (earthworms), fluvial (fish), aerial (insects and birds)? Should we count impacts on species (number of individuals) or on genetic diversity (number of species)? Or should we look at the causes of the impact (farming practices) and the resources deployed to protect biodiversity (hedgerows)? The same goes for water resources: should we take into account the water needed for agricultural activity, or that which is actually used, or simply that which is polluted by agricultural activity?
The answers to these questions are not straightforward: they depend on the sectors and regions on which we wish to take action. We don't count the same indicators depending on whether we're trying to reduce the impact of milk in Poitou or chocolate in Côte d'Ivoire. Measurement indicators have to be adapted to each context and each sector, which makes this type of accounting far more complex than traditional LCA. Second difficulty: at what geographical scale should impacts be accounted for?
Unlike a factory, a territory is fragmented and composite, and the impact of an agricultural activity often extends far beyond the plot of land or even the farm that caused it. What's more, certain indicators, such as aerial biodiversity, only make sense on a broad territorial scale, where landscape structure plays a major role (forests, hedgerows). What's needed, then, is an accounting system that is able to articulate local and territorial scales, and allocate impacts between these different geographical grids.
Unlike factories, a territory is a "shared space" between different economic players, different agricultural productions and different natural ecosystems. A fair accounting of the impacts of agriculture must take this systemic aspect into account. In a crop rotation, for example, each crop has an impact - positive or negative - on the following crop. However, these crops are sold to different economic players: a plan to reduce impacts must therefore be backed up by a common accounting system that takes into account the effects of this rotation and encourages players to collaborate, or at least to align their action plans. Similarly, in mixed farming systems, animal waste is the input for plants, which are in turn the input for animals. A "fair" allocation of impacts to meat and plant products should therefore reflect the contribution of each part to the overall system.
As we can see, effective environmental accounting for food must be able to take into account both "industrial" and "territorial" impacts, which is only natural for a sector based on the production of living matter. However, current accounting standards, inherited from a purely industrial vision, are still largely unsuited to the food sector. Hence the flourishing of new standardization initiatives such as SBTi-SBTN, SIA (Ministère de l'Agricultire et de la Souveraineté), GHG Protocol Agricultural Guidance, WFN (Water Footprint Network), to name the most widely recognized ones, which we hope will soon bear fruit. The stakes are crucial for players in the agri-food sector, who in the coming years will have to make constant, Cornelian trade-offs between the availability of supplies, prices and impacts, and economic, climatic and reputational risks. The subject of risk will be more and more present, and this will require tight management.
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