Assessing the environmental impacts of livestock products in Europe: A consequential life cycle assessment

Livestock products provide key nutrients difficult to obtain from plants, support the rural economy but have significant environmental impacts. Assessing their cradle-to-grave effects is complex due to extensive market interactions of the livestock production systems coproducts. Consequential LCA (cLCA) incorporates market changes in the value chain environmental assessment. This paper presents a cLCA for several livestock products from various production systems across Europe. Beef showed the highest GWP100 climate change impact (25.0–29.0 kg CO2eq per 100 g protein and 2.98–3.46 kg CO2eq per €), while the impact of dairy, pork, and poultry products was much smaller (2.13–7.68 kg CO2eq per 100 g protein and 0.348–1.2 kg CO2eq per €). Specific impact rankings depend on assumptions on land use change and product substitution (e.g., beef vs. dairy cattle). Per hectare, the climate impact of beef was comparable to pork and poultry (5.24–6.63 tonne CO2eq per ha-year for beef, 5.11–6.31 tonne CO2eq per ha-year for pork, and 4.12–7.12 tonne CO2eq per ha-year for poultry products), while dairy varied widely (-2790 – 167 tonne CO2eq per ha-year for dairy) due to consequential effects on land occupation. The impact categories acidification and marine/terrestrial eutrophication showed similar patterns as climate change, but freshwater eutrophication and water use showed deviating patterns due to large regional variation specific to those impact categories. Results highlight that consequential assumptions strongly influence outcomes but provide more informative insights on the mechanisms that drive change.