1st International Life Cycle Assessment Symposium. Towards Circular Water and Nutrient Management for Food Production: Abstract Book

“The Symposium was conceived as a venue to discuss how to effectively evaluate new forms of food production using LCA and whether they hold potential to reduce our impacts on the environment” Providing access to safe, affordable, local and sustainable food products is now more urgent than ever. Recent extreme weather events such as prolongued droughts and flash floods, along with sociopolitical instability, highlight the fragility of our food systems. Food production mainly relies on scarce natural resources, such as water, mineral fertilizers and soil, especially in highly urbanized areas. While innovative forms of local food production are slowly catching up, several new trends still need to be better discussed and quantified. One of them is the application of circularity principles in the production of food, which are conceived as a way of reducing resource consumption but carry with them new concerns. Such is the case of using reclaimed water or recovering fertilizers from wastewater, which results in benefits and impacts on water, soil and human health. In this sense, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool that is helping us to quantify the environmental impacts of food production, but the challenges of new circular practices still need to be integrated. The Symposium was conceived as a venue to discuss how to effectively evaluate these new forms of food production using LCA and whether they hold potential to reduce our impacts on the environment. Around 60 international participants joined this three-day event at the Campus of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. To do so, the event was structured into themes that feed this LCA debate from different perspectives.