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Abstract
ABSTRACT Cocoa is an important commercial crop in the tropics; and estimating the carbon emissions in the producing-areas is a worthwhile effort. The main goal of the current paper was to evaluate the carbon footprint (CF) per kilogram of Colombian cocoa bean produced under conventional and agroforestry managements, following the methods proposed by PAS 2050. In this research, we compared our results to other worldwide researches, showing an overview of the current limitations and challenges involving the CF researches. Our results showed that all calculated environmental burdens were lower for the conventional management. In the agroforestry practice, composting of cocoa pod husks contributed with approximately 34.00E+00 g methane and 2.55E+00 g nitrous oxide emissions per kilogram of cocoa grain produced. Therefore, such practice could reduce CF by 6.00E+00 kg CO2 Eq kg-1, which is certainly a significant amount. These cocoa residues left on the ground have a strong impact on CF of both studied managements due to the anaerobic decomposition of organic matter, which represents more than 85% of emissions. We concluded that both evaluated production processes can emit environmental burdens at the same magnitude. Definitely, there is a widespread need to improve cocoa production system by changing old and less productive plants to the so called clones to ensure cocoa yield and quality worldwide.
Highlights
Climate change is one of the main environmental impacts that threats the entire world, being one of the greatest environmental challenges faced by global agriculture (ALENCAR et al 2013; ORTIZ et al, 2015)
Carbon footprint (CF) has been a well known method of measuring the amount of GHGs discharged throughout the lifecycle of a product or a service (DRUCKMAN et al, 2011; CARBON TRUST, 2007; PLASSMANN et al 2010)
Measurements were in accordance with the PAS 2050 methodology, which is based upon ISO 14040/44 for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Summary
Climate change is one of the main environmental impacts that threats the entire world, being one of the greatest environmental challenges faced by global agriculture (ALENCAR et al 2013; ORTIZ et al, 2015). In 2010, investigations stated that the agricultural sector contributed with 15 to 17% of total anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases - GHG (IPCC, 2011; PONSIOEN & BLONK, 2012). During the last five years, there has been growing interest in calculating and evaluating the amount of GHGs released in the agricultural production by using CF cradle-to-farm- gate measurements (PAGE et al, 2012; CHENG et al, 2011; BOCCHIOLA et al, 2013; DONG et al, 2013; KISSINGER, 2013; KNUDSEN et al, 2014). Since the Abidjan Cocoa Declaration, in 2012, the cocoa sector has gained increasing attention. With that, it was published the Cocoa Global Agenda that aimed at developing new knowledge with the purpose of combining increased yield, technological innovation and sustainability in the cocoa production chain
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