Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice
By Michael A. Clark, David Tilman. 2017
858 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Global agricultural feeds over 7 billion people, but is also a leading cause of environmental degradation. Understanding how alternative agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice drive environmental degradation is necessary for reducing agriculture’s environmental impacts. A meta-analysis of life cycle assessments that includes 742 agricultural systems and over 90 unique foods produced primarily in high-input systems shows that, per unit of food, organic systems require more land, cause more eutrophication, use less energy, but emit similar greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) as conventional systems; that grass-fed beef requires more land and emits similar GHG emissions as grain-feed beef; and that low-input aquaculture and non-trawling fisheries have much lower GHG emissions than trawling fisheries. In addition, our analyses show that increasing agricultural input efficiency (the amount of food produced per input of fertilizer or feed) would have environmental benefits for both crop and livestock systems. Further, for all environmental indicators and nutritional units examined, plant-based foods have the lowest environmental impacts; eggs, dairy, pork, poultry, non-trawling fisheries, and non-recirculating aquaculture have intermediate impacts; and ruminant meat has impacts ∼100 times those of plant-based foods. Our analyses show that dietary shifts towards low-impact foods and increases in agricultural input use efficiency would offer larger environmental benefits than would switches from conventional agricultural systems to alternatives such as organic agriculture or grass-fed beef.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Food Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/592a3484004d9a06ed65b2a994b70f6b9ca5751b
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Ecology
In Food Science
Citations in the corpus
- Multiple health and environmental impacts of foods (2019, neutral): “This is likely because the environmental impact 1000 of fish production differs by fish type and by production methodology (41).”
- A meta-analysis of the effect of organic and mineral fertilizers on soil microbial diversity (2020, background): “For example, eutrophication potential appears greater in many organic than conventional crop systems (Clark and Tilman, 2017) Soils are exceedingly complex and biologically-diverse ecosystems, varying in physico-chemical and biological composition across spatial scales (Howe et al., 2014; Thompson…”
- Organic Agriculture, Food Security, and the Environment (2018, background): “Limited data are available from developing countries, so existing results may not be globally representative (Clark & Tilman 2017, Gattinger et al. 2012, Lee et al. 2015, Skinner et al. 2014).”