Land is scarce, because food, energy, ecosystems, fibers, wood, recreation and infrastructure are competing for land. Agriculture accounts for the major part of human land use. In agricultural literature a heavy debate is... [ view full abstract ]
Land is scarce, because food, energy, ecosystems, fibers, wood, recreation and infrastructure are competing for land. Agriculture accounts for the major part of human land use. In agricultural literature a heavy debate is being held on the most sustainable way towards meeting all these demands: “land sparing” or “land sharing”. Advocates of land sparing argue that high yields by intensive agriculture save land for high quality biodiversity elsewhere, and advocates of land sharing prefer more biodiversity on all land. A developing third option is “sustainable intensification”, which should be intensive, land sparing agriculture with a minimum of ecological damage. Land use assessment should help decision makers to find a way towards keeping optimal soil- and biodiversity conditions under maximum land use efficiency, and assess both, preferably by one balanced indicator. Current LCA methods however, neglect the land sparing option and leave a need for assessment of land use efficiency. Impact based LCA has limitations in providing one balanced indicator, because of its weakness in aggregation of aspects. The preventative costs based Oiconomy system however, measures all involved aspects as costs of prevention, expressed in “Eco Social Cost Units (ESCU’s)”, allowing for aggregation and a balanced assessment of aspects. The EcoCosts system already provides preventative costs for environmental aspects. The objective of this paper is development of a method for the lacking assessment of land use efficiency. For this purpose, the 5-step Oiconomy method was followed, as described in our article “Comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment by Transferring of Preventative Costs in the Supply Chain of Products”, published in JCLEPRO, 2015: 1. Definition of the impact category and characterization factor. 2. Determination of the target. Step 3. A literature review on available preventative measures. 4. Determination of the costs of the preventative measures. 5. Determination of the marginal preventative measure, the most expensive measure necessary to globally reach the target. The found marginal preventative measure is compensation of suboptimal efficiency caused loss of land by conversion of dry marginal land to arable land. Because fresh water supply is the most limiting and expensive factor on dry land, the costs of the marginal measure could be derived by the costs of providing the necessary desalinated seawater on dry marginal land for a globally average yield of corn. Using available data on corn yields, water footprints, costs of seawater desalination, land prices and costs of water transport, a default value was determined for the marginal preventative costs of € 8104/ha.y. The fraction of that, made by the suboptimal efficiency on the self-occupied land, presents the ESCU’s for land occupation. If for instance a crop yield of 4000 kg/ha. is 20% below average, its ESCU-score for land occupation is 0,20 x 8104/4000 = 0,405 ESCU’s/kg. The implications of the proposed method are discussed. We conclude that an assessment method for land use efficiency for preventative costs based LCA is now available, but more research is necessary to determine if this makes a balanced indicator together with the EcoCosts for environmental aspects of land use.
1c. Assessing sustainability (indicators and reporting)
