Abstract
The study of the impact of economic activities on natural resources through global supply chains is increasingly demanded in the context of the growing globalization of economies and product fragmentation. Taking Spain as a case study and a sector with significant economic and environmental impacts, the agri-food industry, the objective of this work is two-fold. First, we estimate the associated water impact, both from the production and consumption perspectives, paying special attention to the water embodied in production exchanges among countries and sectors. To that aim, we use an environmentally-extended multiregional input-output model (MRIO). Second, we assess the main driving factors behind changes in direct and embodied water consumption between the years 1995 and 2009 by means of a structural decomposition analysis. The MRIO model provides a comprehensive estimate of the economic linkages among regions and economic sectors and, therefore, allows calculating the environmental impacts over international value chains. The results indicate that the food industry exerts large impacts on global water resources, particularly given the remarkable interactions with the domestic and foreign agricultural sectors, These growing linkages show how consumption patterns, and, therefore, lifestyles, involve large environmental impacts through the whole and global supply chains.
Highlights
The world currently produces enough food for its citizens, there exist large disparities in the access to food across regions and income levels [1,2]
Once the global interrelations among economic sectors and countries in the world have been obtained, we focus on the Spanish food industry, trying to determine the effect of its activity on water resources by calculating its embodied and direct water consumption
Given its important relationship with agrarian activity, the main direct consumer of water in Spain, it is very important to assess the environmental impacts of this key sector, especially regarding the impact on water resources
Summary
The world currently produces enough food for its citizens, there exist large disparities in the access to food across regions and income levels [1,2]. Food security has been declared as a key challenge to be faced in the near future by many international institutions In this line, the United Nations [3] states that “the food and agriculture sector offers key solutions for development, and is central for hunger and poverty eradication”. It has been proven that economic development is associated with increases in the food supply, as well as with dietary changes that lead to the improvement of the nutritional status of countries [8,9] These changes usually happen together with qualitative variations in the production, processing, distribution and marketing of food, i.e., with the development of the food industry [9]. This sector seems to maintain a high share in the economy across different levels of GDP per capita [10]
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