Deforestation is one of the major issues facing the global agriculture production system, with as much 8% of global CO₂ emissions being attributable to land use change. A well-known example is deforestation for the cultivation of crops such as soybean and oil palm. Many publications have focussed (rightfully so) on this issue and have provided solid global or country specific estimations of CO₂ emissions due to land use change based on available statistics and/or satellite imagery

Challenge: availability of primary data

A big challenge for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) researchers is to translate this impact of land use change to specific crops from specific countries while little primary data is available. Our ‘Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool’ is specifically designed to address this challenge. Land use change in Agri-footprint has been calculated using the "Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool 2016.1" that was developed alongside the PAS 2050-1 (BSI, 2012). The impact of Land Use Change (LUC) on climate change is included in Agri-footprint as a separate flow, allowing users to choose to include LUC or not. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) practitioners can easily include LUC in their sensitivity analysis if they wish. The comprehensive model used is the PAS 2050-1: Land Use Change Assessment Tool.

Update: version 2018

In December 2018 the Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool has been updated. In this update we incorporated the latest data from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) up to 2016. Many of the background data have changed, such as areas reported, forest area statistics, and estimations of biomass carbon stock in forests. Furthermore, we made a correction in the way the emissions are calculated so that the results are fully compliant to the PAS 2050-1. In previous versions the calculations slightly deviated in some details form the PAS 2050-1 requirements which only in some specific cases has impact on the results.

Read more and download update description (version 2018)

References to the tool

The ‘Direct Land Use Change Assessment Tool’ has grown in past years based on the PAS2050 and specifically the PAS2050-1 frameworks, the basic methodology of which is now widely referenced in. Examples are the PEF guidelines & Envifood protocol. It is the most comprehensive implementation of a methodology for GHG emissions from direct land use change that is widely applied.