How SimaPro supports the future food system

Food systems are crucial to human life on Earth. However, factors such as regular heatwaves, changing weather patterns and geopolitical tensions, have been putting increasing pressure on food availability and global food security. There is an urgent need to move to a more sustainable and resilient food system that supports human life, while minimizing damage to ecosystems. Using a practical case study, let’s see how SimaPro can be used to assess key issues for the food sector and therefore support such a transition.

Food systems are a critical part of human existence on Earth. They support human life on earth, but at the same time are responsible for 26% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 70% of freshwater use, and 50% of habitable land use, and 78% of global ocean and freshwater pollution (Our World in Data, 2022).

While food systems are one of the main contributors to environmental problems, they are also one of the biggest victims of a changing environment; regular heatwaves cause a drop in soil moisture, extended droughts and water scarcity lead to crop losses, and excess rainfall leads to flooding and soil runoff that damages crops in turn. Changing weather patterns also lead to shifts in pest patterns, which can cause further crop damage. All these factors contribute to reduced food availability, and thereby global food insecurity. Access to food is also restricted by other factors such as geopolitical tensions. In the face of these growing factors, food system resilience is crucial. This is defined as the ability of the food system to withstand shocks and disruptions and continue meeting its function/demands.

There is an urgent need to move to a more sustainable food system, that meets the need to support human life, while minimizing damage to ecosystems, and even contributes positively to them to support future generations. Healthy ecosystems, with their healthy soils, presence of pollinators and water cycles, are, in turn, part of what makes a food system resilient. They buffer against external shocks, absorbing disruptions and mitigating their impact.

We discussed how Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) can be a part of the solution to transition to a food system in a previous article on PRé website. It’s clear that to holistically assess the environmental impact of food systems, we need to use a lens which looks at multiple different types of environmental impacts concurrently.

In this article, we discuss what this practically means, in the context of how SimaPro can be used to assess key issues for the food sector. We will focus on the main environmental impacts of food and agriculture: climate change, water use, nutrient pollution, release of toxic compounds and biodiversity loss. To demonstrate, we will show a case study of 100 grams of dark chocolate.

Across all of these impact categories, SimaPro follows the same general approach: you can use your own data or draw on built-in datasets (e.g. ecoinvent, Agri-footprint, Agribalyse), then dive into the disaggregated results to trace impacts back to their source and test interventions before implementing them. The specific angle shifts slightly depending on the impact category, as you’ll see below.

Climate change

Climate change is probably the most well-known indicator or impact category when one talks about environmental impacts. Climate change is caused due to the release and presence of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, which trap the sun’s heat, and leads to an increased temperature on the Earth’s surface.

In the food and beverage sector, the main contributors to climate change are typically those taking place at the farm-level, such as emissions from land use change, fertilizer and fuel use for growing crops, and emissions from rearing livestock.

These are measured in In SimaPro and the impact on climate change is calculated using the method from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), shown in equivalent kilograms of CO₂ (kg CO2 eq.).

Using the example of 100 grams of chocolate, SimaPro’s results show that the production of cocoa beans contributes the majority of the carbon footprint (98%); the other ingredients like sugar, and the transportation all contribute minimally. Instead of seeing this result as just a black-box emission factor, you can dive deeper and see the details within the datasets. Looking closer, we see that within the cocoa production, the climate change impact is coming from land use change from cocoa sourced from Indonesia (22%) and Colombia (17%).

These insights can help one to identify specific processes within a part of the supply chain that drive the impacts at the life cycle level. Furthermore, the main substances that are responsible for impact can be examined. This allows one to fully understand the life cycle and its hotspots and determine where interventions can be made in order to reduce the impact. SimaPro also allows us to understand the extent of contribution of each hotspot, thus making it easier to prioritize where action can be taken potentially. Differences among regional production processes can also be observed, which also help to prioritize based on geographical factors.

Water use

The water use impact category, provides insights into water footprint. A water footprint measures the total volume of fresh water used directly and indirectly to produce goods and services.

In the food and beverage sector, water footprint drivers are typically concentrated at the farm level. For crop production, irrigation is the main driver. For livestock, the water footprint comes from both the animals’ drinking water and the water embedded in their feed. Aquaculture also carries a water footprint, through pond and tank water use, evaporative losses, and the feed required to raise fish and shellfish.

In SimaPro, you can assess the water footprint of products with a few different options:

• Water withdrawal: the amount of freshwater extracted from the ground or surface water at each stage of the life cycle, for irrigation, processing, and other operational use. This is “blue” water, and it doesn’t include the rainwater used directly by rain-fed crops. For the chocolate bar, this is 0.09 m3 / 100g.
• Scarcity-adjusted water withdrawal: Water availability differs from region to region, and using water from water-scarce regions has a relatively higher impact on the water availability as compared to the use of water in regions with high water availability.

When water scarcity is taken into account, water use is measured with slightly different units depending on the impact assessment method selected. For example, when using the the AWARE model (used in EF 3.1), the water footprint of 100g of chocolate is 5.17 m3 deprived.

With this, we can see where the biggest hotspots are, which in the case of the chocolate bar is again the cocoa bean cultivation, with almost 45% of the scarcity-adjusted impacts coming from Columbia.

These insights can help to know which ingredients within a food drive impact, or which part of the life cycle drives the largest burden. Considering that implications of water use vary across regions, knowing the source of impact can help prioritise water scarce areas.

Nutrient pollution

Eutrophication indicators measure the potential effects of nutrient pollution. Nitrogen and phosphorus support biodiversity in soil and water within a natural range, but above a certain threshold, they become pollutants.

The main driver differs by setting: freshwater systems are typically phosphorus-limited, so excess phosphorus is usually the trigger for freshwater algal blooms, while marine and coastal waters are typically nitrogen-limited, making nitrogen the main driver of marine blooms. In both aquatic settings, algal overgrowth depletes oxygen as it decomposes, harming fish, invertebrates, and other organisms. On land, nitrogen accumulates in soil, shifting the nutrient balance and reducing biodiversity in nitrogen-sensitive terrestrial ecosystems.

In the food and beverage sector, one of the main causes of excess nutrients is at the farm level, through activities such as animal manure deposition and fertilizer use for food and feed cultivation.

In SimaPro one can assess the impact of freshwater eutrophication, marine eutrophication and terrestrial eutrophication as three separate impact categories:

• Freshwater eutrophication quantifies the amount of phosphorus and is measured in kg P equivalent.
• Marine eutrophication quantifies the amount of nitrogen and is measured in kg N equivalent.
• Terrestrial eutrophication quantifies the damage to terrestrial ecosystems through excessive nitrogen deposition and is measured in mol N eq.

For further reading on eutrophication, take a look at one of our PRé articles here.

Figure 6 below displays the impact of the chocolate bar production on terrestrial eutrophication. For the case of dark chocolate, the primary driver (again) the cocoa bean cultivation, where ammonia emissions released from the application of fertilizers, and the burning of biomass during land conversion.

These insights can help to identify the drivers across all life cycle stages that contribute to excess nutrients in the different ecosystems. The most effective levers typically fall into three groups: reducing the nutrient load applied in the first place (e.g. reduced or precise nutrient application), improving how and when fertilizer and manure are applied to limit losses; and treating nutrient-rich effluent before it reaches waterways or soil. Because SimaPro traces impact back to individual processes, it also shows which of these levers matters most for a specific product.

Release of toxic compounds

Human toxicity and ecotoxicity indicators measure the release of toxic compounds, such as heavy metals and organic substances, that accumulate in ecosystems once released into the environment. The human toxicity indicators are used to understand the impact of these compounds on human health, while the ecotoxicity indicator is used to understand the impact of these compounds on ecosystems.

In the food and beverage sector, toxicity is mainly driven by four sources:

1. Pesticides are designed to be biologically active at very low concentrations, so even small quantities that leach or run off into waterways can carry an outsized ecotoxicity footprint.
2. Fertilizers can introduce heavy metals which accumulate in soil and contributes to human toxicity, a risk significant enough that the EU now regulates some heavy metal limits in fertilizers.
3. Food processing contributes through the use of cleaning agents and disinfectants.

Ecotoxicity in aquatic environments is discussed in further detail in this article.

These insights make it possible to trace which processes and substances drive the release of toxic compounds, and how much each contributes to the impact.

In the case of the chocolate bar LCA, the main contributor is again the cocoa bean production which accounts for more than 95% of freshwater ecotoxicity. Looking more closely, this impact is concentrated in a small number of pesticide active ingredients, rather than spread evenly across all pesticide use. These insights make targeted reduction possible: instead of reducing pesticide use broadly, action can focus on the specific active ingredients driving the impact.

Biodiversity loss

There are several biodiversity footprinting methods available, and the right choice depends on the purpose of the assessment along with the data, time, and budget available.

Direct measurement, counting species at a given site, is likely the most accurate approach, but it is also resource-intensive and difficult to scale across a supply chain. An LCA-based approach is more accessible: as with environmental LCA more broadly, it expresses impacts through damage categories, such as damage to ecosystems, which aggregates damage to freshwater, marine, and terrestrial species. This is the approach available in SimaPro.

Assessing biodiversity loss itself is more complex still. Biodiversity loss is the end state of the multitude of pressures including deforestation to make space for agricultural land, toxicity in ecosystems, eutrophication in water bodies, and the heat stress and flooding driven by climate change.

In the previous paragraphs, we’ve shown how you can assess impacts on specific environmental issues which are relevant for biodiversity loss in the food and beverage sector: climate change, water use, nutrient pollution and release of toxic compounds. The pressures from these issues can be combined to understand the general effect on ecosystems through an overall indicator for potential biodiversity loss. In LCA terminology known as an endpoint approach, shown below.

Often, the main drivers of biodiversity loss are land use and climate change, closely linked but not the same thing. Land use affects biodiversity in two distinct ways: it drives greenhouse gas emissions (i.e. through land conversion releasing stored carbon, captured within the climate change impact category), and it also directly modifies habitats through land occupation and land transformation. Climate change then acts on biodiversity through its own separate pathways, such as heat stress, shifting rainfall patterns, and flooding, independent of any specific land use decision.

The type and intensity of land use matter: an intensively farmed monoculture and a regenerative agroforestry plot both count as “agricultural land,” but represent very different pressures on biodiversity. Dedicated land use impact categories in LCA capture this directly, using characterization factors that vary by land use type, intensity, and region, alongside whatever climate change impact the same land use change causes.

However, understanding biodiversity impacts through an LCA lens does not capture the full spectrum of biodiversity loss, since biodiversity itself is a complex topic. A single metric (e.g. species richness) looks at only a part of the puzzle for ecosystem damage in biodiversity and does not address biodiversity on a genetic or species level or other important aspects of biodiversity.

For a full picture of biodiversity loss, it’s therefore worth treating LCA results as a starting point rather than an endpoint. A useful approach is to use the LCA-based assessment as a screening tool: it identifies which impact types, and which parts of the value chain, are most material for a given product or portfolio. From there, more resource-intensive complementary approaches, such as qualitative expert assessment, recognized certification schemes, and spatial or site-specific data, can be targeted at the specific pressures relevant to that environment, rather than applied evenly across the full value chain.

One score is not the goal

For the food and beverage sector, a single-issue view of environmental impact isn’t enough. Climate change dominates most sustainability reporting, partly because it’s the most consistently regulated and data-rich indicator, but carbon performance doesn’t reliably track with other environmental pressures. As this article has shown, more than 95% of dark chocolate’s freshwater ecotoxicity traces back to pesticide use in cocoa cultivation, an impact a climate-only assessment would never surface. Optimizing for carbon alone risks exactly this kind of blind spot: a product or practice can look good on climate while carrying a heavy water, biodiversity, or toxicity footprint elsewhere.

This is where SimaPro’s value goes beyond producing a single number. Depending on your goal and type of operations, you can collect primary data yourself, for example on water use or pesticide application, or draw on the datasets built into SimaPro, such as ecoinvent, Agri-footprint, and Agribalyse. You can dig into the disaggregated flows behind any result rather than treating it as a black box, tracing an impact back to the specific process or activity driving it. From there, you can model the effect of a potential intervention before implementing it, weighing trade-offs across indicators so a fix in one impact category doesn’t create a new problem in another.

None of this replaces the harder work of acting on what the data shows. Measuring and modeling give you the evidence and the priorities but closing the gap between today’s food system and one that operates within planetary boundaries still depends on the pace and scale of the changes that follow; something no single tool can guarantee. Used well, though, SimaPro supports an important part of this continuous journey: understand the impact, test an intervention before committing to it, and check whether it delivered the improvement you expected, so each iteration is better informed than the last.