TITLE:
Economic and environmental sustainability assessment of wine grape production scenarios in Southern Italy
AUTHORS:
Alfio Strano, Anna Irene De Luca, Giacomo Falcone, Nathalie Iofrida, Teodora Stillitano, Giovanni Gulisano
KEYWORDS:
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); Life Cycle Costing (LCC); Sustainable agriculture; Decision Making; Global Warming; CO2 Equivalents
JOURNAL NAME:
Agricultural Sciences,
Vol.4 No.5B,
July
12,
2013
ABSTRACT: The
low resilience of ecosystems imposes a sustainable management of natural resources through more
rational uses, land protection, energy saving and low carbon production
technologies. Agriculture has a great responsibility in managing these
resources that are the principal inputs of its processes. Production systems
must pay attention, at the same time, to economic viability and environmental
protection. Since decades, the international scientific community is facing the
great challenge of assessing the sustainability of agricultural engineering techniques,
in order to help both private and public decision making, but also to meet
consumer’s requirements for high quality and low impact products. To achieve
that, widely accepted assessment instruments, whose results have to be clear
and understandable to a broad public, and that are necessary. In this
direction, Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is gaining consensus as conceptual model,
considering goods and services production and consumption all along the whole
life cycle, from planning to disposal. Its methodological frame- work, the Life
Cycle Management (LCM), offers many standardised tools to assess impacts of
products and processes: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), to evaluate environmental
impacts and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) for economic ones. Among many impacts
categories LCA also allows to identify the carbon footprint, that can be
quantified in terms of Global Warming Potential (GWP). This research has analyzed and compared different scenarios of wine
grapes production in Cirò, an important viticultural area located in Calabria
region (Southern Italy). LCA and LCC methodologies have been useful to assess
them from an environmental and economic standpoint. Results have allowed the authors
to rank training and farming systems performances.