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Local Food Systems and Their Climate Impacts: A Life Cycle Perspective

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Book cover Land Use Competition

Part of the book series: Human-Environment Interactions ((HUEN,volume 6))

Abstract

The creation and maintenance of local food sovereignty and security is a top priority on political agendas. Food systems are characterized by complex dynamic nexuses at different levels and scales, and sustainability assessments necessarily need to approach social, economic, and environmental dimensions. While the provision of food is limited, among other factors, by the quantity of fertile areas, these areas are also attractive for other land uses, e.g., for the cultivation of energy plants or afforestation, which can result in socioeconomic conflicts related to land-use competition. Numerous studies have looked at the global picture, using integrated assessment models, in which biophysical and economic models are coupled to derive potential future pathways and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of feeding and fueling the rising global population. While such models can be useful to show global boundary conditions, their representation of complex local-to-global interdependencies is necessarily limited. Looking at local structures, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to analyze a product supply chain and gain detailed insights in order to provide apparently complex data in a simple way for detecting option spaces or informing civic societies. This chapter addresses the local food system of Vienna. It shows what we can learn from LCA about, for example, potential savings of food-related GHG emissions and about gaining efficiencies of local produce in contrast to imports from the international market.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ernährungssouveränität.at/wiki/CSA-Betriebe_und_Initiativen_in_%C3%96sterreich#weitergehende_Initiativen http://foodcoops.at/?cat=10

  2. 2.

    https://www.bmlfuw.gv.at/land/bio-lw/Bioweltmeister.html

  3. 3.

    https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment-leisure/vienna-biogas.html

  4. 4.

    Established in the early 1990s, la Via Campesina is a transnational social movement that fosters social rights and sustainable food production and responsible for coining the concept of “food sovereignty.”

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to my colleagues Christian Lauk, Juliana Lutz, and Stefan Hörtenhuber for their valuable comments and discussions and Thomas Drapela for the help with the graphic representation of the case study area. Funding from ERC-STG2010-263522 LUISE and EU 7th Framework Programme project-308552 DESIRE is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria Universitaet Klagenfurt-Wien-Graz, Vienna, Austria

    Michaela C. Theurl

  2. Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, FiBL Austria, Vienna, Austria

    Michaela C. Theurl

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  1. Michaela C. Theurl
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Correspondence to Michaela C. Theurl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. of European Ethnology & Integrativ, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jörg Niewöhner

  2. Governance and Sustainability Lab, Trier University, Berlin, Germany

    Antje Bruns

  3. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Patrick Hostert

  4. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Krueger

  5. Dept. of Geography & IRI THESys, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Jonas Ø. Nielsen

  6. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Helmut Haberl

  7. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Christian Lauk

  8. Institute of Social Ecology, Alpen-Adria University, Vienna, Austria

    Juliana Lutz

  9. Halle (Saale) & IRI THESys, Leibniz Ins. for Agri. Devel. Trans. Eco, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Müller

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Theurl, M.C. (2016). Local Food Systems and Their Climate Impacts: A Life Cycle Perspective. In: Niewöhner, J., et al. Land Use Competition. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33628-2_18

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