Food and the environment: towards sustainability indicators for protein production

摘要

Food is of vital importance to the development, health and productivity of humans, but the production is at large cost to the existence, resilience and productivity of natural ecosystems. The PROFETAS research programme is concerned with the development of a toolkit for the sustainable production of protein foods. This is based on the hypotheses that a shift in the Western diet from animal proteins to plant proteins is 1. environmentally more sustainable than present trends, 2. technologically feasible, and 3. socially desirable. PROFETAS consists of sixteen interlocking projects. The present project focuses on the first hypothesis. It aims to supply a method to assess the environmental effects of alternative protein production and consumption chains. This should facilitate a deliberate choice of the most sustainable of compared food systems. Current research focuses on the development of user-friendly sustainability indicators. A review of the environmental effects associated with agricultural production results in a rather elaborate and diverse list of impacts ranging from habitat loss to the destruction of the ozone layer. The scope of the method requires that a selection be made, on the basis of which both present and future food production systems can be judged. The choice of the main environmental impacts and the translation into ecologically relevant parameters is discussed.