Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) | Source | Report |
This report, based on consensus among 30 international researchers, outlines methodological opportunities and challenges for Nutritional Life Cycle Assessment (nLCA) of food items, with the aim of enabling future assessments of meals and diets. It underscores that nLCA should go beyond quantifying nutrient masses to evaluate nutritional quality and potential health impacts, requiring collaboration across environmental, nutritional, and health sciences.
Key methodological recommendations include defining clear study purposes tailored to decision contexts and extending system boundaries to the consumption stage (“cradle to plate”) to account for processing, storage, and preparation effects. Functional units should reflect nutrition—such as nutrient indices, specific nutrient quantities, or serving size—while results should also be reported against mass- or volume-based reference flows to ensure comparability. Environmental assessments should prioritize food-relevant categories (climate change, water use, land use, eutrophication, ecotoxicity), alongside a dedicated nutrition impact category.
Research priorities include defining a minimum nutrient set, distinguishing nutrients to limit from those to encourage, refining nutrient indices, improving representation of uncertainty and variability, and expanding region-specific datasets, particularly from developing countries and downstream supply chain stages. Extending nLCA to meals and diets within absolute environmental limits is seen as essential for guiding sustainable agri-food policies that balance nutrition and ecosystem protection.
