| dc.description.abstract | Food production is a key anthropogenic system driving global warming, biodiversity
loss, land use change, and biogeochemical cycle disruption. Food system sustainability is a field
of research dedicated to addressing these issues, ultimately motivated to meet human needs
within biophysical planetary boundaries. One of the many tools that have emerged in food
system sustainability research is the life cycle assessment (LCA). Though not without limitation,
individual farm-level LCAs and the works that synthesize them are extremely valuable, as they
characterize system contributions to environmental concerns and resource depletions. Drawing
from published LCAs, previous meta-analyses have demonstrated that food production systems
and their associated contributions to environmental concerns can be highly variable between
producers of the same product, between products, and between geographies, among other factors,
and that there is more to be understood with regard to both food systems and LCA methods. This
exploratory research investigates how and why farm-level production systems vary in their
contributions to environmental concerns within and between production regions. Separately, this
work also assesses whether life cycle assessments have thus far been undertaken systematically
to geographically represent production patterns. With these objectives in mind, a review and
comparison of available wine LCA data was conducted, as well as a systematic wine LCA
literature inventory. Results indicate that wine grape production system contributions to global
warming can be highly variable within and between production locales, and that LCA research
has not been undertaken systematically to geographically represent production patterns. These
conclusions are intended to help inform future food system sustainability research methods, thus
contributing to the sustainable development of our food systems. | en_US |
