Life cycle assessment, life cycle costing and social LCA of 100+ CRFSI

The current deliverable describes the developments and outputs of the FoodE (Food Systems in European Cities) European research project in relation with the activities carried out in Task 2.3 (T2.3). More specifically, T2.3 resulted in two deliverables, namely D2.4 and the present one (D2.5). FoodE, funded by the Horizon 2020, was launched in 2020 and will last for 4 years. The consortium involves 24 organisations from 8 European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Slovenia, and Spain) and aims at accelerating the growth of citizen-led food system initiatives and creating related innovative and inclusive job opportunities at local level. Based on the simplified layer of the methodological framework and the related data collection protocol developed in T2.2 and T2.3, the present work collects, processes, and analyses primary and secondary data from City Region Food System Initiatives (CRFSI) across Europe, adopting a Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) approach, for assessing and scoring their social, economic, and environmental sustainability performances. To this scope a survey with a quali-quantitative perspective and limited data requirements was circulated to more than 260 CRFSI, obtaining 100 CRFSI answers. As described in previous project reports in relation with the methodological framework, namely Deliverables D2.2 and D2.3, the core survey part was composed by scorable questions, while an additional optional appendix was designed to collect quantitative data on the environmental sphere and gather further CRFSI insights for subsequent project tasks. The resulting inventory of collected primary and secondary data has been developed in D2.4 and is complemented by the data analysis and scoring carried out in the present deliverable, to generate a synthetic sustainability assessment of the European CRFSI and a rapid appraisal of generic hotspots of impact. The presented simplified assessment provides a first-of-a-kind scoring mechanism of evaluation of more than 100 CRFSI that can be adopted and replicated both by LCT practitioners and the general public. Results of the analysis are first presented in a single sustainability average score and then on individual Impact Categories (IC) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) score across the three pillars of sustainability. Such results allow to identify strengths and weaknesses of CRFSI in relation to their sustainability performances. The outcome and related activities will pave the way for the extensive sustainability assessment of FoodE Pilots case studies that will be conducted in future phases of the project and for the deployment of an online tool to survey the sustainability of other CRFSI.