Agriculture & Land use change

Given the known scale of environmental pressures associated with the food sector, an entire sub-project within PRINCE was dedicated to exploring the implications of agricultural production to meet Swedish demand. In particular, new indicators were developed for use of agrochemicals and for GHG emissions due to tropical deforestation resulting from land use change, supplementing existing data on other GHG emissions linked to agriculture.

Overview

PRINCE developed novel environmental extensions for the use of three types of pesticide – herbicides, fungicides and insecticides – along with the use of veterinary antimicrobials. The pesticide extensions built on data from the international FAOSTAT database. As the European Unions has the only consistent reporting system for veterinary antimicrobial use, the EU average was applied to countries beyond the EU.

For climate impacts, various GHG emissions extensions were taken from EXIOBASE related to food production: GHGs from fossil fuels, methane and nitrous oxide (NO2). The addition of land-use change-linked emissions (through work in a PRINCE case study) meant PRINCE sub-project could produce the most comprehensive GHG emissions indicators for Swedish food consumption yet available. This yielded per capita GHG emissions related to food consumption of 2.0 tCO2e in Sweden.