Welcome to
AgImpacts
When should we look beyond GHG emissions in developing sustainable agricultural practices?
The AgImpacts team set out to explore the trade-offs among the environmental impacts of ten agricultural commodities. Our analysis is based on life cycle assessments of each product and aims to provide valuable insight for producers and distributors looking to pioneer a more sustainable future.
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What Are Trade-offs?
Trade-offs refer to the way that sustainability efforts might reduce emissions within one targeted category, but unintentionally cause harmful environmental impacts across a different category. For example, if an initiative focused solely on reducing GHG emissions, the choice might be made to switch to on-site solar production. In doing so, although the GHG emissions from fuel use would decrease, land use or freshwater withdrawal might increase, and remain unaccounted for. It is important to evaluate whether the unintended consequences of sustainability efforts create environmental harm beyond the intended benefit.
Evaluation of trade-offs is complex and requires awareness of trends across a wide variety of environmental indicators. This project assists producers and distributors by providing data, graphs, and analysis of the relationships between five major environmental indicators, alongside several commodity-specific indicators. By establishing the presence or lack of correlations between different environmental indicators, this project assists in optimization of sustainability efforts, and helps with decision making to best ameliorate environmental impact.
Key Environmental Indicators
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions refer to the anthropogenic production of certain gases which are known to trap heat in the atmosphere. Read more . . .
Freshwater Withdrawal
Freshwater withdrawal is the measure of how much water is used from a terrestrial source. This includes lakes, rivers, groundwater, and other forms of surface water, but excludes the water used in rain-fed systems. Read more . . .
Eutrophication Potential
Eutrophication is an overabundance of nutrients in a body of water. This over-fertilization can ultimately lead to an oxygen depleted or otherwise toxic environment. Read more. . .
Acidification Potential
Acidifying emissions are commonly caused by sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), ammonia (NH3), and carbon dioxide (CO2). Each of these molecules contribute differently to acidification. Read more . . .
Land Use
Land use is a measure of the amount of land that a farm uses per unit of product. A higher land use value means that the farm is using more land to produce the same amount of a crop than a farm that has lower land use. Read more . . .
AgImpacts Web Tool
The AgImpacts interactive web tool provides a platform for exploratory data analysis of all 10 commodities. The tool displays relationships between the environmental indicators, a geographic overview, and raw data for each commodity using interactive charts and tables.
Commodities
This project was conducted by first-year undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from September 2020 through January 2021 with support from MIT’s Office of Experiential Learning, MIT Terrascope, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
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