Application of Ecological Footprint Analysis on nectarine production: methodological issues and results from a case study in Italy

Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA) is an environmental accounting system that provides an aggregate indicator which is both scientifically robust and easy to understand by non-experts. Although based on the lifestyle consumption of natural resources, recent improvements in the methodology now allow the application of EFA to a final product. Thus the resulting footprint value represents the environmental cost of all of the activities required to create, use and/or dispose of a particular product. The application of EFA to agricultural systems is still uncommon and examples in the fruit sector rare. In this work a detailed application of EFA to a commercial nectarine orchard in Piedmont (Italy) is presented. In contrast to previous studies, we considered not only the one-year field operations, but also the whole lifetime of the orchard. The calculation was conducted for six different orchard stages: (ST1) nursery propagation of the young plants; (ST2) orchard establishment, (ST3) young trees producing low yields, (ST4) mature trees at full production, (ST5) declining trees with low yields, and finally (ST6) orchard removal. The environmental costs at each stage are presented and related to each other on the basis of the relative footprint value. Results highlight the importance of applying EFA to the entire lifecycle of orchard production: ST4 accounted for the majority of costs at 65% followed by ST2, ST3 and ST5 at or near 10%, whilst the costs of ST1 and ST6 were negotiable. Thus it is the type of ST4 production used which can have the greatest impact on EFA values.     

A review of studies applying environmental impact assessment methods on fruit production systems

Although many aspects of environmental accounting methodologies in food production have already been investigated, the application of environmental indicators in the fruit sector is still rare and no consensus can be found on the preferred method. On the contrary, widely diverging approaches have been taken to several aspects of the analyses, such as data collection, handling of scaling issues, and goal and scope definition. This paper reviews studies assessing the sustainability or environmental impacts of fruit production under different conditions and identifies aspects of fruit production that are of environmental importance. Four environmental assessment methods which may be applied to assess fruit production systems are evaluated, namely Life Cycle Assessment, Ecological Footprint Analysis, Emergy Analysis and Energy Balance. In the 22 peer-reviewed journal articles and two conference articles applying one of these methods in the fruit sector that were included in this review, a total of 26 applications of environmental impact assessment methods are described. These applications differ concerning e.g. overall objective, set of environmental issues considered, definition of system boundaries and calculation algorithms. Due to the relatively high variability in study cases and approaches, it was not possible to identify any one method as being better than the others. However, remarks on methodologies and suggestions for standardisation are given and the environmental burdens of fruit systems are highlighted.