Tiered life cycle sustainability assessment applied to a grazing dairy farm

Abstract The environmental, economic, and social aspects of dairy sector have been studied to different extents, but never integrated into an overall sustainability assessment of the dairy sector. This work developed a tiered life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework to fill this gap. The LCSA framework was defined with three tiers ranging from a streamline LCSA to temporally and spatially specific LCSA. The different specification in each tier includes the number and type of impact indicators and the demand for amount and quality of input data. The application of the tiered LCSA was demonstrated using survey data from an Irish dairy farm. The weighted overall sustainability score differed by tier because of the number of indicators and the data specification. The results of the study revealed the need to balance performance for environmental, economic, and social aspects of the farm. The tiered LCSA provides a framework for comparing the sustainability of dairy farms using the same valuation criteria, with the simple specification of Tier I providing entry level LCSA, and the more detail and comprehensive specification in Tier II and Tier III reducing the effect of uncertainty (due to data quality and number of indicators) on sustainability score, thus providing a more precise sustainability profile for a farm.

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