Agricultural food production is responsible of roughly one quarter of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Curbing those emissions is key to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives. Organic farming has good potential to achieve low area emission intensity. However, due to its lower yields, concerns have raised that organic farming expansion may drive land-use change and related CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, there is life cycle assessment-based evidence that food diets low in animal-sourced products help alleviate agricultural land requirement and GHG emissions. However, very few studies have considered both leverages together and simulated their consequences for land-use change and related GHG emissions.

OBJECTIVES

This project aims at exploring to what extent organic farming expansion in Europe, combined with changes in food and feed consumption, may affect land use worldwide and related GHG emission. The project is based upon the combination of two models simulating respectively biomass, nitrogen and carbon flows within organic systems (GOANIM model), and agricultural products resource-utilisation balances, international trade and land-use change (GlobAgri model). Both models will simulate a set of scenarios combining alternative assumptions on organic farming development (rate of expansion and type of farming), changes in feed rations (from current to low opportunity cost feed) and changes in food diets (from current to vegetarian and vegan diets).

RESOURCES

The project’s originality lies in its strong interdisciplinarity (by combining system and global agronomy, animal science, forestry, soil science, economics, econometrics, geography, and nutritional epidemiology), its global approach (to capture telecoupling effects of organic farming expansion) and its modelling approach (which makes both crop yields and land-use changes to be endogenously determined in a spatially explicit manner to account for the high spatial variability of CO2 emissions induced by land-use changes).

Participants

INRAE units

• ISPA, Bordeaux
• Infosol, Orléans
• Smart-Lereco, Rennes
• Eco-Pub, Grignon
• Pegase, Rennes
• Herbivores, Theix
• BOA, Tours
• Ecodevelopment, Avignon
• EREN, Paris

Partners

• ENS Ulm / CNRS
• UC Louvain
• Aberdeen University
• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
• Wageningen University
• FiBL

Contact

• Thomas Nesme (UMR ISPA)
• Chantal Le Mouël (UMR SMART)