Abstract
Nutritional life cycle assessment integrates nutrition into environmental life cycle analysis to comprehensively account for agri-food sustainability challenges including micronutrient deficiencies, nutrient diversity, and environmental impacts like climate change or freshwater scarcity, when compared to traditional life cycle assessment. We use regionally-explicit nutritional and environmental data at the food product and country levels to calculate environmental impacts, nutritional adequacy (e.g., Nutrient Rich Food Indices), and nutritional diversity (e.g., Rao's Quadratic Entropy). We first discuss various reasons for the differences in nutritional and environmental sustainability metrics for the various food products and countries. We then present nutritionally-invested environmental impacts. Here, because nutritional life cycle analysis is a nascent method, we explore the influence of methodological choice (e.g., capped versus uncapped metrics, energy standardization, contingent versus non-contingent measures) on results. We find using nutritionally-invested environmental impacts change the relative sustainability rankings of foods and countries, regional variability in nutritional profiles and environmental footprints of food products influence results, methodological choice alters nutritional metric scores, and food products can cover nutritional deficiencies in an environmentally-friendly manner. Our study contributes to research on the joint accounting of nutritional and environmental food system outcomes.
Highlights
Understanding the interconnectedness between nutritional and environmental dimensions of food production is crucial to the progress of sustainability initiatives as the impacts of climate change, environ mental degradation, and hidden hunger become ever-present in our daily lives (Field et al, 2014; Springmann et al, 2018; von Grebmer et al, 2014; Willett et al, 2019)
Legumes, nuts, and seeds (LNS), fruits, and meats have the highest scores followed by roots and tubers (RT), dairy and eggs (DE), and cereals
LCA practitioners may argue including disqualifying nutrients violates the premise of the functional unit (FU), which is to represent the benefits of a product; as we are adjusting the environmental impacts, we argue that this approach is more of a hybrid between the FU and LCA impact weighting phases
Summary
Understanding the interconnectedness between nutritional and environmental dimensions of food production is crucial to the progress of sustainability initiatives as the impacts of climate change, environ mental degradation, and hidden hunger become ever-present in our daily lives (Field et al, 2014; Springmann et al, 2018; von Grebmer et al, 2014; Willett et al, 2019). Nutritional and environ mental dimensions vary by region because of soil conditions, agricul tural practices, and fortification policies (Green et al, 2020; Poore and Nemecek, 2018a; Thompson and Amoroso, 2011). Newer challenges to improving our agri-food production system include increased recognition for producing nutritious foods as opposed to enough food (Ingram, 2020; Nelson et al, 2018; Smetana et al, 2019). For such nutrition security analyses, actors need proper metrics to assess nutritional diversity and nutritional adequacy. We use metrics from the Nutrient Rich Food Index (NRF) family; namely, the regionally-explicit NRF21.2 and the NRFpro tein-sub score; we developed the latter to elucidate differences between
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