(96d) Microbially Produced Proteins to Reduce Global Pressure on the Planetary Boundaries

There is increased awareness about the global environmental sustainability challenges modern society faces including climate change, the need for more sustainable agriculture, and economic growth. The Planetary Boundary (PB) framework was introduced to communicate the safe operating space for humanity to thrive towards sustainable development while keeping Earth’s systems stable at the Holocene-like state. However, six out of nine planetary boundaries have been transgressed, where agriculture and food systems are major impact drivers in categories like climate change, freshwater change, or biogeochemical flows. In a food chain context, meat is the major contributor to global environmental impacts. Therefore, an absolute environmental sustainability assessment is presented here in line with the PB framework and the Life Cycle Assessment (PB-LCA) of biologically produced meat alternatives to show the environmental hotspots and assess replacement scenarios based on global consumption trends.

The PB-LCA is built on calculating environmental impact categories pertaining to the Earth System Processes described in the PB framework. As the LCA and PB categories do not match either in their control variables or in the impact level in the cause-effect chain, the Environmental Footprint (EF) v3.1 method, the life cycle impact assessment method used for which absolute thresholds based on the Planetary Boundaries are available. The above enables the harmonization of LCA calculations and the definition of safe operating space in the PB framework. Relevant impact categories in the EF v3.1 were selected, which show more relation to the PB, including climate change, water deprivation, marine and freshwater eutrophication. Land system change is measured using land occupation as a proxy, and biodiversity loss is calculated based on the loss in mean species abundance as a proxy for functional diversity boundary. After impact characterization, the absolute sustainability ratios are calculated to determine the system’s performance in absolute terms. This step requires allocating the share of the safe operating space for the system.

The share of the safe operating space is downscaled based on equal per capita principles, and allocation was defined based on economic and grandfathering approaches. The LCA results of the microbially produced meat show that increasing the energy efficiency of the production process could lead to reducing the impact below the absolute threshold for climate change or land use change. Reduction of all impact categories was observed with promising emissions avoided in climate change, land use, and biodiversity loss. The above is attributed to lower resources and land transformed for red meat consumption, resulting in less soil degradation for pasture, grazing, and crops for animal feed, along with less fertilizers and lower energy consumption, even for the scenarios with renewable energy.