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Centre for Environmental Strategy, RELU Project
 Where are you based?
The University of Surrey, Guildford (Surrey), UK
What kind of organisation are you (eg. academic, business, NGO etc)?
Academic, with a strong research component.
What is your/their broad area of expertise?
The Centre for Environmental Strategy (CES) is internationally renowned for its collaborative research in environment and sustainable development. CES received a 5A rating in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the first for which it was returned as a distinct academic unit. From its inception in 1992, CES has acted as a multi-disciplinary research centre, recognising that long-term environmental issues cannot be addressed fully within the confines of any one academic discipline. However, CES is located within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences to ensure that it has a problem-solving ethos. Environmental System Analysis - the application of both "hard" and "soft" systems approaches - has been a core activity, including life cycle assessment and material flow accounting. CES has a history in food and biotic production systems LCA, including e.g. participation in the EU Concerted Action for the Harmonisation of LCA Methodology for Agriculture, and the organisation of an expert workshop to include land use impacts in LCA .
Give a range of the projects you are you currently working on.
We are about to finish a RELU -funded project, aiming to assess the benefits or otherwise of increased domestic production of vegetables compared to the current trend to increase imports. This project is done jointly with the University of Bangor, and CES' role focuses on the environmental assessment of food supply chains by means of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
 What aspect of your work with relevance to the food-climate change issue would you like to feature?
The RELU project on "local vs. global vegetables" has been focused on the cradle to grave environmental impacts (including climate change) arising from the provision of vegetables to the British consumer. This includes domestic sources and imports from Spain and Africa. Amongst other disciplines ranging from sociology to nutrition science, this interdisciplinary project team includes soil scientists who have been measuring a complete ecosystem carbon balance and the main soil greenhouse gas emissions (GHG: CO2, N2O and CH4) from the cropping stage in the different countries.
At the other end of the supply chain, consumers and our habits of purchasing, cooking and disposing of food (waste) are another key aspect determining the environmental impacts of food. In this sense, the modelling work done for the RELU project is resulting in very interesting results on the importance of human excretion in the overall food life cycle.
Please describe the work in more detail - how it started, what stage it is at, who has/have been involved and their different roles.
The RELU project started in the end of 2004 and is now about to finish (early 2008). The team has been addressing many aspects related to the issue of domestically-grown vs. imported vegetables: from the environmental effects along the life cycle to consumers' attitudes towards local food, including farmers' health and rural economy, and changes in nutritional content of foodstuffs. Within CES, the project has involved a full-time post-doc researcher and two visiting post-doctoral fellows, as well as the contribution of one of CES' doctoral students. Their overall goal has been to complete the LCA of the studied systems, including some methodological development on land and freshwater use related impacts. Specific goals tackled by the visiting researchers have been a thorough study of the comparative assessment of production technologies enabling out-of-season production of lettuce (protected horticulture) and the detailed modelling of retail-to-grave stages (including human excretion and waste treatment).
 What do you see as the big questions for the food climate research community at the moment?
The GHG emissions related to ecosystem functioning (through soil respiration) are the elephant in the room. Applied ecologists are only beginning to get to grips with the concepts and magnitudes of ecosystem carbon balances, and LCA practitioners have seldom included these emissions in LCA. When they have been included, mainly the CO2 embodied in the biomass has been considered, and only in a few published references is there mention of change in soil organic carbon. However, soil respiration may override carbon fixation by crops, and this is not often recognised.
On the other hand, the solution to reduce GHG emissions probably lies in consumers' behaviour, rather than on technological fixes or ecosystem management. How to engage consumers in reducing their (direct and indirect) environmental impacts is thus a big research question.
What are the big questions you feel you are seeking to answer at the moment?
The soil scientists in Bangor are now working closely with the LCA experts in CES to integrate their measurements into the LCA results. This is crucial because although such emissions are known to be highly relevant in the life cycle of foodstuffs there are not enough quantifications of their variability.
Is there any expertise you feel you lack and would you welcome help/collaboration with others?
CES does not have the experimental background to address soil emissions, and we are very happy to be working alongside Bangor in this aspect. Given the increasing importance of food imports, for example from Africa, more active collaboration to obtain reliable and representative primary data would be very helpful.
What are your plans for the immediate future as regards this work?
Completing the LCA reports for the participating farmers (which have been used as a successful tool for knowledge exchange), integrative reports on the environmental impacts of the vegetables studied, and several journal papers on methodology development and case studies.
What are the milestones might we look out for (e.g. report publication; launch event; conference, etc.)?
The integrative reports will be available from the CES website ( http://www.surrey.ac.uk/CES , from early 2008), where the references of the journal papers will also be available when possible. Some of our results will be presented in the next RELU Conference , to be held in London on the 7 th November 2007.
What are the insights / skills / data (big or small) you can offer to the rest of the research world on food and climate change?
What we have already published is the temporal variability in energy use related to providing fruit from different sources, as well as other aspects that affect the reliability of food carbon footprints. Available soon will be important insights on the variability introduced by the agro-ecosystem's carbon balance.
Contact details
Llorenç Milà i Canals
RELU Project, Centre for Environmental Strategy
University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey UK
Tel: +44 (0)1483 686678
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