Within this project, five major environmental indicators (GHG emissions, freshwater withdrawal, eutrophication potential, acidification potential, and land use) were selected for study across all commodities. These indicators were specifically chosen with the intent of diversifying sustainable agriculture efforts beyond sole reduction of GHG emissions. The breadth covered by these indicators also contributes to this project’s intent of encouraging agricultural producers and distributors to consider potential “trade-offs” as they make sustainable choices.
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.
Generally, our team found one of three relationships for each comparison. When our team observed a positive correlation between the given environmental indicator and GHG emissions, we considered it a "win-win" relationship, in which decreasing GHG emissions has the same effect on the given environmental impact (Figure 0.1, top). When points are scattered with seemingly no coordination, and the resulting line of best fit is roughly horizontal, our team considered GHG emissions and the given environmental indicator to be independent of one another (Figure 0.1, center). The final commonly observed relationship was a negative correlation, which our team considered to be a "trade-off" (Figure 0.1, bottom). This implies that decreasing GHG emissions is somehow connected to increasing the magnitude of the given environmental impact.
Figure 1. Scatter plots like those above are commonly found throughout our analyses within this project. One of the above relationships can generally be found for each commodity and the associated environmental indicators.