Assessing food consumption vulnerability through the criticality framework within a life cycle perspective ; Evaluer la vulnérabilité de la consommation alimentaire à travers le cadre de la criticité dans une perspective de cycle de vie

Food systems today have to face up to a number of challenges while ensuring food security for the populations. Global food consumption is responsible for a number of environmental impacts, for example on climate change, pollution or biodiversity. Furthermore, food consumption relies on natural resources (land, water, certain mineral resources such as phosphate) and is vulnerable to the increasing scarcity of these resources. These trends will be exacerbated by the increase in global food demand in 2050 due to population growth. Solutions have been proposed to meet these challenges, such as changes in diets or agricultural practices. To assess whether these solutions effectively reduce the environmental impact and vulnerability of food systems, quantitative assessment tools are required. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a benchmark method for assessing the environmental performance of systems and has been applied at many levels in the food sector, from the food product to the agricultural territory, via diets and food consumption. However, it does not currently include metrics for characterising the vulnerability of systems. The resource criticality framework, which assesses technical and economic dependences on resources, has recently been incorporated into LCA to assess the vulnerability of systems to the inaccessibility of resources. However, these developments have not been applied to the food sector. Based on these elements, the research question of the thesis is as follows: Can the criticality framework be applied in a life cycle perspective to characterize the vulnerability of food consumption? The first step is to develop Supply Risk indexes for key natural resources of food systems, i.e. land and water. These indexes were developed by adapting the criticality framework to the specific characteristics of these resources. These indexes were then integrated into the LCA of a food product, bread, and highlighted potential trade-offs between environmental impacts and resource vulnerability. Supply Risk indexes ...