Modelling impacts of agriculture on freshwater

In the last decade, the UNEP-SETAC working group (WULCA) established a framework to assess water consumption in life-cycle analysis, which was largely adopted by the ISO 14046 standard on water footprinting and the upcoming guidelines on water footprinting in the livestock sector by the technical advisory group on water of FAO (FAO, 2018a). In an LCA or water footprint assessment, it is important to first localize the hotspots of water use, since often it is in the supply chain. Further research needs to provide better tools to assess hotspots of impacts accounting for uncertainty, since the supply chain data is often not detailed in standard assessments. In the longer term, benchmarks should be established to identify the improvement potential in combination with relevance among the thousands of processes generally involved in an LCA or water footprint study to most effectively improve the production system.