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The adverse effects of agriculture and livestock production on the environment are well-known and require mitigation in order to achieve sustainability in the food production chain. This study focused on adverse effects related to biogeochemical flows of phosphorus and nitrogen cycles which natural balances have been greatly disturbed by current practices. To assess the potential benefits and detrimental effects of proposed mitigation measures, adequate impact indicators are required. The challenge lies in identifying and providing indicators that cover the important aspects of environmental sustainability and allow a direct comparison of policy alternatives. A review of potential indicators that are also consistent with those used to indicate the performance of agricultural and general sustainability (i.e. the European Green Deal) led to the selection of fifteen agri-environmental indicators covering the main environmental issues in agriculture. The indicators identified offered an effective representation of environmental behaviour and would be useful in communicating a comprehensive ‘dashboard’ for professional end users of solutions to nutrient recovery and nutrient efficiency improvement in arable and livestock systems. The selected dashboard indicators (DBI) covered the dimensions of ‘use of primary resources’, ‘emissions to the environment’ and ‘resilience to climate change’. Five case studies were investigated to test the DBI using an Excel questionnaire applying the qualitative approach of the Delphi method together with expert knowledge. As expected, the results indicated that there were potential benefits of the technologies in terms of improved ‘nutrient recovery’ and decreased ‘nitrate leaching’. Potential disadvantages included increased electricity and oil consumption and greater ammonia volatilisation due to the increased use of organic fertilisers. The indicator ‘water’ received more neutral responses; thus, the specific technology was not expected to consistently affect the indicator. In relation to ‘particulate matter’, the results were indicated to be ‘unknown’ for some solutions due to the difficulty of predicting this indicator. Furthermore, methodologies for estimating quantitative values for the dashboard indicators were proposed, and a quantitative assessment was performed for the solution ‘catch crops to recover nutrients’, confirming the responses in the qualitative assessment. The dashboard indicators selected covered the main aspects of the solutions, identified in more comprehensive studies of environmental impacts, as being suitable for the rapid assessment of technologies for nutrient recovery in agriculture. As such, they can be used as a pre-screening method for technologies designed to improve the environmental sustainability of arable and livestock systems. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

In this study, we apply the inter-regional input–output model to explain the relationship between China’s inter-regional spillover of CO2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007. Based on this model, we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions in trade and the regional trade balances of CO2 emissions. Our results do not only reveal the nature and significance of inter-regional environmental spillover within China’s domestic regions but also demonstrate how CO2 emissions are created and distributed across regions via domestic and global production networks. Results show that a region’ sC O2 emissions depend on its intra-regional production technology, energy use efficiency, as well as its position and participation degree in domestic and global supply chains. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract Resolving regional carbon budgets is critical for informing land-based mitigation policy. For nine regions covering nearly the whole globe, we collected inventory estimates of carbon-stock changes complemented by satellite estimates of biomass changes where inventory data are missing. The net land–atmospheric carbon exchange (NEE) was calculated by taking the sum of the carbon-stock change and lateral carbon fluxes from crop and wood trade, and riverine-carbon export to the ocean. Summing up NEE from all regions, we obtained a global ‘bottom-up’ NEE for net land anthropogenic CO2 uptake of –2.2 ± 0.6 PgC yr−1 consistent with the independent top-down NEE from the global atmospheric carbon budget during 2000–2009. This estimate is so far the most comprehensive global bottom-up carbon budget accounting, which set up an important milestone for global carbon-cycle studies. By decomposing NEE into component fluxes, we found that global soil heterotrophic respiration amounts to a source of CO2 of 39 PgC yr−1 with an interquartile of 33–46 PgC yr−1—a much smaller portion of net primary productivity than previously reported.