Joint assessment of the environmental impacts and resource criticality of French food consumption scenarios in 2050 from a regionalised life cycle perspective

• DOI: 10.1016/j.spc.2025.02.005
• Publication Date: 2025-02-11T08:10:28Z
• Authors: Lazare Deteix; Thibault Salou; Eléonore Loiseau
• Keywords: Trade-offs; Supply risk; [SDV]Life Sciences [q-bio]; Impact regionalisation; Vulnerability; Sensitivity analysis; Prospective LCA

International audience<br/>Five prospective scenarios combining changes in diets, supply chains, and agricultural practices have been proposed for French food consumption in 2050, including a business-as-usual (BAU) situation. This study aims to perform a joint assessment of their environmental impacts and resource criticality according to a regionalised life cycle perspective.Food consumption is modelled through 46 representative products. The life cycle inventories (LCI) of these products were parameterized to be consistent with each scenario, considering factors such as diets, agricultural practices, origin and volume of food imports, and energy mixes. The IMPACT World+ method is used to compute regionalised impacts, and Supply Risk Potential (SRP) indices are quantified for mineral resources, land, water and agricultural products based on the Joint Research Centre criticality method.The results reported that three of the four scenarios have lower environmental impacts than the BAU scenario for all impact categories. For climate change, impacts could be reduced by between 25 % and 45 %. Similar results were observed for resource criticality. These results were mainly explained by the change in diets, with lower levels of overall consumption, and less animal products in proportion.Phosphate and potassium fertilisers use, strongly influenced by agricultural practices, was the primary contributors to mineral resources criticality. Depending on the share of meat products in diets, pastures contributed significantly to land SRP. In the same way, meat consumption influenced agricultural SRP through animal feed. Finally, water SRP was mainly driven by hydropower production for electricity.The sensitivity analysis highlighted potential trade-offs between environmental damage and resource criticality for mineral resources and agricultural products (higher environmental impacts lead to lower SRP). Furthermore, the regionalisation of impacts can lead to variations of up to 50 % in impact results for a given scenario. Additional efforts are thus needed for considering local conditions and practices in agricultural LCIs.<br/>