From farm accountancy data to environmental indicators: Assessing the environmental performance of Spanish agriculture at a regional level.

Understanding the environmental impacts of current agricultural practices is a starting point for transitioning towards sustainable agriculture, which is a goal to be achieved by the European Union. This study aims to provide a set of environmental impact indicators with which to assess and compare the environmental performance of a broad group of agricultural reference holdings at the Spanish NUTS 2 level. A life cycle assessment approach based on statistical data on farm accountancy is applied. The unit of analysis is a reference holding on which a specific crop is grown in a NUTS 2 and follows a specific management system (open-field irrigated, open-field rainfed, or greenhouse). The system boundaries are set at the farm gate, and the impact results are expressed per 1 € of net value added. For most reference holdings, the EF scores per net value added are similar regardless of their EF scores per kg commodity, suggesting a correspondence between the use of resources and the economic results. The environmental footprint is clustered into four groups. The first one accounts for 78 % of the sample and represents the holdings with the lowest impact (between 9.7·10-5 and 2.88·10-3 EF score·NVAfc-1); the second cluster groups seven reference holdings (3 herbaceous and 4 Mediterranean perennial crops) with an environmental footprint of between 3.04·10-3 and 9.01·10-3 EF score·NVAfc-1; the third group comprises four irrigated herbaceous crops holdings with the highest impact (between 1.37·10-2 and 2.13·10-2 EF score·NVAfc-1); and the last group corresponds to the holdings with economic losses (mostly herbaceous and two Mediterranean perennial crops). This research highlights the challenge of improving the competitiveness and profitability of Spanish farming. In this way, agricultural practices that generate environmental impacts without achieving their economic goals would be avoided.

Dataset to monitor regionalised environmental impacts of the main agricultural products in Spain.

Estimating the average environmental impacts of a representative crop in a specific region is a helpful starting point from which to propose improvements in the agricultural sector. However, data collection from official representative sources is complex, and often they require subsequent treatment to be transformed into meaningful inventory data. This article shows a comprehensive dataset for obtaining inventory data and developing an environmental life cycle impact assessment of representative agricultural production corresponding to reference holdings at a regional level (NUTS 2) in Spain. The dataset comprises Excel files with the data compiled from secondary sources to be used in the assessment and the R code scripts to transform the data into relevant inventory data to estimate the environmental impacts of the reference holdings. This dataset is a reliable tool for researchers and other potential users to be used as a secondary information source for further studies. It can also be used to estimate the environmental impacts of the farming activity of agri-food products in other regions or countries by collecting similar data for the specific region and adjusting the R code.

An approach to regionalise the life cycle inventories of Spanish agriculture: Monitoring the environmental impacts of orange and tomato crops.

Agricultural life cycle assessment (LCA) at the sub-national regional level may be a valuable input for the decision-makers. Obtaining representative and sufficient data to develop life cycle inventories (LCIs) at that level is a relevant challenge. This study aims to contribute to the development of LCIs representative Spanish crops based on economic and operational information available in official sources to assess the average environmental impacts of these crops in the main producing regions. A comprehensive approach is proposed considering both the temporal variability and uncertainty of input data by using different methods (e.g. linear programming, weighted averages, Monte Carlo simulation, forecasted irrigation, etc.) to estimate the inventory data of reference holdings. From these inventories, the environmental assessment of those reference holdings is carried out. Two case studies are developed, on orange and tomato crops in the main producing regions, where climate change (CC), freshwater scarcity (WS), human toxicity non-cancer (HTnc), and freshwater ecotoxicity (ET) are evaluated. The environmental scores obtained differ significantly from region to region. The highest environmental scores of orange reference holdings correspond to Comunidad Valenciana for CC (1.94·10-1 kg CO2 eq.) HTnc (4.16·10-11 CTUh) and ET (7.45·10-3 CTUe), and to Andalucia in WS (17.4 m3 world eq.). As to greenhouse tomatoes, the highest scores correspond to Comunidad Valenciana in the four categories analysed (CC = 3.18 kg CO2 eq., HTnc = 3.6·10-9 CTUh, ET = 1.5 CTUe and WS = 13.3 m3 world eq.). The environmental scores estimated in this study are consistent with the literature, showing that the approach is useful to obtain a representative description of the environmental profile of crops from official statistical data and other information sources. Widening the data gathered in ECREA-FADN, and also that from other data sources used, would increase the quality of the environmental impact estimation.