Compare methods

	Food-System Life Cycle Assessment	Foodshed Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2018	2009
Originator	ISO 14040/14044 LCA framework; food-system synthesis by Joseph Poore & Thomas Nemecek	Christian J. Peters, Nelson L. Bills, Jennifer L. Wilkins, Gary W. Fick & Arthur J. Lembo
Type	Cradle-to-grave environmental modelling pipeline for foods and diets	Spatial modelling pipeline for food-source areas and localization capacity
Seminal source	Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-992.	Peters, C. J., Bills, N. L., Lembo, A. J., Wilkins, J. L., & Fick, G. W. (2009). Mapping potential foodsheds in New York State: A spatial model for evaluating the capacity to localize food production. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 24(1), 72-84.
Aliases	Food LCA, Agri-food Life Cycle Assessment, Dietary Life Cycle Assessment, Cradle-to-Grave Food Footprinting	Foodshed Modelling, Foodshed Mapping, Food Self-Sufficiency Analysis, Localization Capacity Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Foodshed analysis is a spatial method for understanding where a population's food comes from, or could come from, by analogy with a watershed: just as a watershed delineates the land that drains to a river, a foodshed delineates the land area capable of feeding a given population centre. Christian Peters, Nelson Bills, Jennifer Wilkins, Gary Fick and Arthur Lembo formalised the modern, spatially explicit version in 2009, mapping potential foodsheds in New York State by matching geographically distributed agricultural production capacity to the food demand of population centres and allocating supply by proximity. The result quantifies how much of a region's food needs could be met locally — its localization capacity and self-sufficiency — and which land areas would supply which cities. Foodshed analysis has become a core tool for assessing the feasibility and sustainability of regional and local food systems.