Challenges with using subnational trade and environmental data in support of global agri-food supply chain sustainability

Meeting demand for agricultural commodities while tackling climate change, biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation is challenging. Powerful actors from governments and multi-national companies have set ambitious targets to reduce pressure on the natural environment. However, the complexity of global supply chains hinders connecting consuming actors to locations of production. Despite advances in tools and methods aiming to convert data into useful information about environmental concerns, the implementation of this knowledge into decision-making is lagging.

This thesis’ contribution to knowledge is the development of fine-scale environmental impact assessment analyses of traded agricultural commodities informed by supply chain stakeholder requirements through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. Adopting the principles of Life Cycle Assessment, sub-national trade-flow mapping, and quantitative spatiallyexplicit analysis of environmental hotspots of agricultural production is conducted across multiple production countries. Four sustainability dimensions are included: land use change (LUC) emissions, biodiversity loss, water scarcity and soil productivity loss, and the sensitivity of results to
methodological and data choices tested. Finally, the thesis explores how future land use change can be assessed by incorporating sub-national supply chain detail into predictive land use change models.

Results reveal stakeholders will benefit from incorporating multiple dimensions of sustainability in decision-making. Quantitative assessments show that the spatial variability of all studied sustainability dimensions is large and that geographic hotspots of LUC emissions do not overlap with other studied impact hotspots. Findings are sensitive to both methodological and data choices. Finally, incorporating sub-national supply chain mapping into predictive models resulted in projected land use change concentrated to fewer geographies.

Overall, the thesis concludes that assessing the impacts of agricultural trade requires multiple dimensions of sustainability to better inform supply chain decision making. Additionally, more research is needed on the comparison of data, indicators and methods to support robust environmental impact assessments going forward.