TY - JOUR
T1 - Subnational mobility and consumption-based environmental accounting of US corn in animal protein and ethanol supply chains
AU - Smith, Timothy M.
AU - Goodkind, Andrew L.
AU - Kim, Taegon
AU - Pelton, Rylie E.O.
AU - Suh, Kyo
AU - Schmitt, Jennifer
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/9/19
Y1 - 2017/9/19
N2 - Corn production, and its associated inputs, is a relatively large source of greenhouse gas emissions and uses significant amounts of water and land, thus contributing to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, local air pollutants, and local water scarcity. As large consumers of this corn, corporations in the ethanol and animal protein industries are increasingly assessing and reporting sustainability impacts across their supply chains to identify, prioritize, and communicate sustainability risks and opportunities material to their operations. In doing so, many have discovered that the direct impacts of their owned operations are dwarfed by those upstream in the supply chain, requiring transparency and knowledge about environmental impacts along the supply chains. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) have been used to identify hotspots of environmental impacts at national levels, yet these provide little subnational information necessary for guiding firms’ specific supply networks. In this paper, our Food System Supply-Chain Sustainability (FoodS3) model connects spatial, firm-specific demand of corn purchasers with upstream corn production in the United States through a cost minimization transport model. This provides a means to link county-level corn production in the United States to firm-specific demand locations associated with downstream processing facilities. Our model substantially improves current LCA assessment efforts that are confined to broad national or state level impacts. In drilling down to subnational levels of environmental impacts that occur over heterogeneous areas and aggregating these landscape impacts by specific supply networks, targeted opportunities for improvements to the sustainability performance of supply chains are identified.
AB - Corn production, and its associated inputs, is a relatively large source of greenhouse gas emissions and uses significant amounts of water and land, thus contributing to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, local air pollutants, and local water scarcity. As large consumers of this corn, corporations in the ethanol and animal protein industries are increasingly assessing and reporting sustainability impacts across their supply chains to identify, prioritize, and communicate sustainability risks and opportunities material to their operations. In doing so, many have discovered that the direct impacts of their owned operations are dwarfed by those upstream in the supply chain, requiring transparency and knowledge about environmental impacts along the supply chains. Life cycle assessments (LCAs) have been used to identify hotspots of environmental impacts at national levels, yet these provide little subnational information necessary for guiding firms’ specific supply networks. In this paper, our Food System Supply-Chain Sustainability (FoodS3) model connects spatial, firm-specific demand of corn purchasers with upstream corn production in the United States through a cost minimization transport model. This provides a means to link county-level corn production in the United States to firm-specific demand locations associated with downstream processing facilities. Our model substantially improves current LCA assessment efforts that are confined to broad national or state level impacts. In drilling down to subnational levels of environmental impacts that occur over heterogeneous areas and aggregating these landscape impacts by specific supply networks, targeted opportunities for improvements to the sustainability performance of supply chains are identified.
KW - Commodity flow modeling
KW - Environmental accounting
KW - Food systems sustainability
KW - Life cycle assessment
KW - Supply chains
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U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1703793114
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1703793114
M3 - Article
C2 - 28874548
AN - SCOPUS:85029566359
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 114
SP - E7891-E7899
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 38
ER -