Assessing Environmental Sustainability: A National-Level Life Cycle Assessment of the Icelandic Cattle System

Abstract

The Icelandic Government’s climate action plan proposes climate-neutral beef production, reduced methane emissions, and improved fertilizer management. However, a life cycle assessment (LCA) of cattle production is lacking to determine the current status of its environmental impacts. This study conducts a cradle-to-farm gate LCA of interconnected dairy and beef cattle systems. The functional unit (FU) is “1 kg of edible cattle meat” for the meat and “1 kg of fat and protein corrected milk” (FPCM) for milk produced in Iceland in 2019. The multifunctionality between meat and milk from the dairy system is handled using mass, economic, and biophysical allocations, respectively. The environmental impacts were estimated using the ReCiPe 2016 v1.08 mid-point (H) impact assessment method. Furthermore, this study conducts an uncertainty and global sensitivity analysis to understand the possible range of environmental impacts and identifies key influential parameters in the dairy and beef cattle system. Animal production is a hotspot for global warming, while the feed (hay and concentrate) is a hotspot for other environmental categories. The allocation method choice highly influences the environmental impacts. This study underscores the need to harmonize data collection and access to centralized, reliable data sources to reduce uncertainty and meet climate action plan goals on both the national and global scale.