Industry level life cycle assessment (LCA) of Australian avocado production (AV23015)

What is it all about?

This investment is conducting an environmental life cycle assessment of Australian avocado production, focusing on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (carbon footprint) and water use / water scarcity impacts (water footprint).

The life cycle assessment will provide the avocado industry with:

1. An understanding of the nature, scale and significance of environmental impacts.
2. A recommended pathway for optimised reduction of impacts to inform the industry’s sustainability strategy.
3. Quantitative metrics for baseline and benchmark environmental credentials against which to track future mitigation efforts.

Life cycle analysis studies to generate these metrics will be conducted at two scales – for individual case study growers and for the industry as a whole:

• The individual case studies will explore different production typologies in detail and ground-truth the environmental improvement initiatives.
• The industry-scale life cycle analysis will collect a larger sample of data from which generate environmental metrics representing the Australian avocado industry, from which industry baselines and benchmarks will also be derived.