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2024 (English)Report (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
The agricultural sector in Sweden needs to cut GHG emissions and contribute to the climate goal of net-zero emissions by 2045. The GHG reduction goal for agricultural emissions is not quantified, but the Swedish climate policy framework states that ‘Swedish food production shall increase as much as possible with as little climate impact as possible’. Multiple key actors within the sector of food and agriculture have developed roadmaps or industry specific goals for reducing GHG emissions from the sector. Consequently, requirements for transparent GHG accounting and reporting are increasing within the agricultural sector, both on a national and international level. The purpose of the Agrosfär tool is to establish an automatic data driven climate calculator used to calculate GHG emissions from agricultural products and on a farm enterprise level. Automation and automatic data collection will save time, increase the accuracy of the calculations, and simplify updates of the tool to keep it aligned with the most recent climate data and climate reporting methodology. It will make it possible to continuously carry out follow-ups on climate performance indicators and measure improvements from climate measures taken. A working group consisting of agricultural life cycle assessment experts has developed the framework of the tool (e.g., setting system boundaries, selecting methodologies and input data). A technical team has developed algorithms, a digital interface and coupled the tool to other existing agricultural databases, providing farm specific information on crop and animal production data, soil characteristics, carbon footprints and amounts of purchased inputs etc. The tool and user interface have been developed based on input from farmers through prototyping and in-depth interviews. The priority guidelines on which the calculation model is based are the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR), the International Dairy Federation (IDF)’s approach for carbon footprint for the dairy sector, and FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance guidelines (FAO LEAP). From the farm perspective, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) Corporate Standard, GHG Protocol Agricultural Guidance (Scope 1 & 2) and GHG Protocol Corporate value chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard are guiding standards. Where standards have diverged or where assumptions have been required, the working group has made expert judgements on which method/guideline to follow or what assumptions to make. A first version of the tool, first described in report version 1, was developed as the basis for further development. The first version contains an animal and a crop module, and can calculate the carbon footprint of crops, milk and beef. This report (version 1.1) has been updated to include the most recent developments of the tool. The main change is that the tool can now also be used to calculate farm climate impact on a yearly basis. Future possibilities to develop the tool and calculation model are described in chapter 7, including suggestions for developing modules for more animal production types, deepening the integration between the crop and animal modules, expanding sources for automatic data collection, developing a carbon sequestration module, and other technical and methodological improvements to ensure alignment with important climate reporting standards. The report will be repeatedly updated as the tool develops, and new versions of the tool are released.
Series
RISE Rapport ; 2024:2
National Category
Agricultural Science
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-72007 (URN)978-91-89896-43-7 (ISBN)
Note
Agrosfär is an EIP-Agri financed project aimed at developing a software solution that cancalculate climate footprints on a detailed level within primary food production inSwedish Agriculture. This report describes an updated version of the climate calculationmodel used in the software solution, Agrosfär. Agrosfär is based on automaticallygenerated data from the Agronod platform, which retrieves data from the farm's varioussystems. To some extent, data needs to be supplemented to Agrosfär to carry out aclimate calculation; this data is added directly to the tool. The goal of Agrosfär is tocalculate the carbon footprint of the farm and its products over time, enable benchmarksbetween similar farms, and visualize where climate-reduction activities will have thehighest effect.The calculation model team consisted of specialists from Lantmännen,Hushållningssällskapet, Växa and RISE with support from a project manager and adata scientist who have worked with the first version of the model between November2021 and April 2022. The first model version was implemented in the Agrosfärsoftware and tested by farmers in 2022. The updated version was implemented in theAgrosfär software and tested by farmers in 2023. Agrosfär has developed and beendeployed to more users over time.Maria Berglund, Hushållningssällskapet Halland, has primary responsibility for thecalculation model related to animal husbandry and manure management.Martin Laurentz, Lantmännen, has primary responsibility for the calculation modelrelated to crop production.The LCA-methodology of the updated report has been internally reviewed by DaniraBehaderovic and Serina Ahlgren at RISE, and the animal model has been reviewed byMikaela Lindberg at SLU.The Agrosfär climate calculation model has gone through a third-party revision,performed by Andreas Asker and Martyna Mikusinska, LCA experts at Sweco.Agrosfär is a product of Agronod; owned by Växa, Lantmännen, LRF,Hushållningssällskapet, Arla and HKScan.
2024-02-212024-02-212024-02-21Bibliographically approved