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

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.