Are single global warming potential impact assessments adequate for carbon footprints of agri-food systems?

Comparing life cycle environmental impacts of food access and consumption pre- and during COVID 19 in New York State's Capital Region

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced household food shopping, food consumption, and food waste generation. However, the dietary environmental impacts for different income groups during COVID-19 remain unknown. To analyze dietary environmental impacts for various income groups, a process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted based on two electronic food access surveys implemented in the New York State's Capital Region during the COVID-19 pandemic and public and proprietary databases. We found that life cycle global warming potential, cumulative energy demand, acidification potential, and water resource depletion of per capital food consumption in the studied area tended to be lower during COVID-19 than pre-COVID-19. In contrast, life cycle eutrophication during COVID-19 was slightly higher than pre-COVID-19. The environmental impacts occurring at the food production stage were higher than those at the local transportation and waste disposal stages. The lowest income group had the lowest dietary environmental impacts due to their lowest food consumption of all the food categories. The second-highest income group had the highest dietary environmental impacts, since they consumed the most red meat which has a high impact intensity. This is the first study to our knowledge to investigate the differences in dietary environmental impacts among income groups during COVID-19.

The science of climate change and the effect of anaesthetic gas emissions

The dedication of the international anaesthetic community to reducing the environmental impact of healthcare is important and to be celebrated. When this is underpinned by robust science, it has the potential to make a real difference. However, volatile anaesthetic agents have been widely promoted in the medical literature as damaging to the climate, leading to a drive to remove them from clinical practice. This is based on notional 'CO2 -equivalent' values created using the simple emission metric known as the global warming potential. Here, we assert that when proper consideration is given to the science of climate change, volatile anaesthetic gas emissions cannot be simply equated to real carbon dioxide emissions, and that their climate impact is vanishingly small. This paper gives anaesthetists a framework to make informed choices founded on climate science and calls for attention to be refocused on the urgent need to reduce the real carbon dioxide emissions associated with healthcare.