Ezra Systems Seminar: Greg Thoma (Colorado State)

Description

Also available via Zoom
 

An introduction to lifecycle assessment of food production systems

There is growing concern regarding the food system that will be needed to support the estimated 10 billion people in 2050. Identifying pathways to a sustainable food system requires that sustainability characteristics are measured. The adage “you manage what you measure” is true in this case. This presentation will introduce a framework (lifecycle assessment) for evaluation of sustainable systems and discuss knowledge gaps regarding the assessment of sustainable food systems that provide nutritious diets.

Lifecycle assessment (LCA) is a systems framework to provide an accounting of environmental and sustainability characteristics of production systems. It is based on the ISO 14040/4 series of standards and consists of 4 iterative phases: goal and scope definition; lifecycle inventory collection; lifecycle impact assessment; and interpretation. LCA is used to evaluate full supply chains across a range of environmental metrics (climate change, eutrophication, human and ecosystem health, water and resource depletion, etc.). Lifecycle assessment can be used for product development, identification of environmental hotspots, improvement opportunities, and setting benchmarks against which future progress can be assessed. LCA has an explicit goal the identification of tradeoffs in complex systems, including tradeoffs between stages in the supply chain and tradeoffs across environmental dimensions (e.g., reducing water use at the expense of increased carbon emission). Attributional and Consequential paradigms for LCA will be presented and discussed.

Several examples of LCAs of different foods will be presented in the context of recognizing tradeoffs across different impact categories, and an evaluation of potential effects of changing US dietary patterns will be included.
 

Bio:
Greg Thoma is the Director of Agricultural Modeling and Lifecycle Assessment for the AgNext program at Colorado State University. He is leading efforts at stakeholder engaged, experimentally verified, model development for sustainable animal agriculture systems. Dr. Thoma served on the steering committee from 2014-2019 on the Swiss National Science Foundation’s National Research Program titled, “Healthy Nutrition and Sustainable Food Production” that has the goal of promoting healthy nutrition through a safe, high quality food supply, available in sufficient quantity at affordable prices, while minimizing environmental impacts and fostering efficient resource utilization.

He recently retired after a 28-year career in chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas where he served as inaugural Director for Research of The Sustainability Consortium and Director for Research for the University of Arkansas Resiliency Center. He has worked in sustainable food systems since 2008 and has led numerous food and agriculture life cycle assessment projects: milk, cheese, milk delivery systems, yogurt, swine, poultry, corn, fruits and vegetables, pulses, and beef.

He is the North American subject editor for Agriculture for the International Journal of Lifecycle Assessment and has served on the scientific/technical/organizational committee for numerous international LCA conferences. He has been active with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership since its inception serving as the Technical Advisory Group Lead/Co-lead for development of the poultry, swine, and large ruminants’ guidelines.