Compare methods

	Agroecosystem Analysis	Food-System Life Cycle Assessment
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2018
Originator	Gordon R. Conway	ISO 14040/14044 LCA framework; food-system synthesis by Joseph Poore & Thomas Nemecek
Type	Systems-diagnosis pipeline for agroecosystem performance	Cradle-to-grave environmental modelling pipeline for foods and diets
Seminal source	Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117.	Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-992.
Aliases	AEA, Agroecosystem Properties Analysis, Conway Agroecosystem Analysis, Agroecosystem Diagnosis	Food LCA, Agri-food Life Cycle Assessment, Dietary Life Cycle Assessment, Cradle-to-Grave Food Footprinting
Related	4	4
Summary	Agroecosystem analysis (AEA) is a systems-diagnosis framework, formalized by Gordon Conway in 1987, that characterizes any agricultural system through four properties: productivity, stability, sustainability, and equitability. Rather than judging a farming system by yield alone, AEA treats the agroecosystem as an ecological system shaped by human management and asks how much it produces, how reliably it produces it across seasons and shocks, whether it can maintain output over the long run, and how its benefits are distributed among the people who depend on it. The analyst bounds a system at an appropriate hierarchical level — plot, field, farm, watershed, or region — and uses interdisciplinary teams, ranked questions, and simple structured diagrams to surface the key relationships and the trade-offs among the four properties that drive design and policy choices.	Food-system life cycle assessment (LCA) quantifies the environmental footprint of a food, meal or diet across its entire life cycle — from agricultural inputs on the farm, through processing, packaging, transport, retail and cooking, to waste disposal. Following the ISO 14040/14044 framework, an analyst defines a functional unit (such as one kilogram of food, 100 grams of protein, or 1000 kilocalories), compiles a life-cycle inventory of all inputs and emissions at each stage, characterises those flows into impact indicators (greenhouse-gas emissions, land and water use, eutrophication and acidification), and interprets the result with sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. Poore and Nemecek's 2018 Science synthesis, covering tens of thousands of farms worldwide, showed that impacts vary as much as fifty-fold among producers of the same product and that even the lowest-impact animal foods typically exceed plant substitutes — establishing LCA as the central tool for comparing the sustainability of foods and diets.