Sustainable Food System –Targeting Production Methods, Distribution or Food Basket Content? - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 206

Scenario 4 assumes more vegetarian food consumption produced on ERA-farms. In this
scenario, the area of agricultural arable land would decrease by slightly more than 30% to 1.7
million hectares. And most important, the nitrogen surplus would decrease by 64% or 55%
of today's level, depending on if method 1 or 2 is used for calculating the surplus.

3.3 Global warming impact and primary energy resources consumption
Figure 2 and Figure 3 present the results for global warming impact (measured as GWP in
CO 2 -equivalents) and consumption of primary energy resources (measured in MJ primary
energy resources). Here, four scenarios are included as the different systems of processing and
transportation are also compared. The trends are similar to those for nitrogen surplus in both
cases. However the differences between the scenarios are smaller for the GWP. Changing to
ERA-production (Scenario 2) resulted in a 10% reduction in GWP, from 1000 to 900 kg CO 2 -
equivalents with the calculation based on the four categories of farms (calculation according
method 1 described in 2.2). The very low per-hectare results in Scenario 2 and 3 are a result of
these scenarios requiring a very large (and unrealistic) area under agriculture production. In
Scenario 4 (ERA-production, local processing and distribution and a more vegetarian food
profile) the GWP is reduced with 40% compared to Scenario 1.
For the primary energy resources consumption the relation is almost exactly the same as for
nitrogen surplus. The use of primary energy for the food consumption is reduced with 44%
per capita with the calculation based on the four categories of farms (method 1) with food
from ERA agriculture with a traditional diet but with a large part of the monogastric meat
replaced by ruminant meat (Scenario 2). Reduced meat consumption with 75%, would
reduce the primary energy use with an additional 40%, or in total 67% (Scenario 4).
Processing food locally (and the resulting shorter transports) has some impact on the GWP
but almost no impact on the primary energy resources consumption (Scenario 2 vs. Scenario
3). The latter can partly be explained by the choice of energy carriers (fossil fuels vs.
electricity) in the food processing industries and by very inefficient meat transports in the
studied case.

4500 6

GWP/capita
GWP/ha

3800

4000

5

3500

3100

3000 4

2500

3

2000

1600

1400

1500 2

1000

900

1000

700

600

1

500

0 0

1 2 3 4

Scenario

Fig. 2. Global warming potentials in four scenarios, kg CO 2 -equivalents per capita and kg CO 2 -
equivalents per ha.