Abstract:
Agriculture has a large impact on the environment and retailers
increasingly stimulate their suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of
agricultural production. The environmental impact resulting from producing a
commodity can be measured with a life cycle analysis (LCA) but performing an
LCA is costly and time-consuming. In the first paper of this series a practical and
general method to identify hotspot areas in crop production on a global scale was
developed. The method was implemented for potatoes. The objective of the work
reported here was to evaluate the tool and to identify improvement opportunities
for each of seven indicators: yield, erosion risk, nitrogen surplus, depletion of water
reserves, biocide use, carbon footprint, and impact on biodiversity. The tool produces
realistic outputs that can be used to target improve-ment efforts and thus improves
the use efficiency of limited resources. The tool can be expanded to produce similar
results for other crops; methods to improve the resolution of the tool are discussed.
