(506b) Consumption-Based Accounting of Environmental Impacts Associated with Beef Supply Chains in the United States: Implications for FEW Nexus

With increasing population, food supply chains have evolved to be robust and often associated with great distances between the food production and consumption locations. The consumption of food commodities, and specifically of animal-based products, is associated with environmental impacts including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and vast quantities of embodied resources, such as energy and water. A crucial step for enhancing the environmental sustainability of intertwined food-energy-water (FEW) systems is quantification of both production and consumption-based impacts of the food system. Such an understanding can aid in devising interventions for improving the environmental sustainability of FEW systems that are effective from both production and consumption perspective. While there exists a rich body of work on production-based impacts of diverse food commodities, consumption-based accounting remains challenging. In addition, most studies focus on impacts at state or national levels, producing results that are limited in their ability to guide decision-making and identify improvement opportunities. We address these challenges by presenting a systems-based framework to quantify the consumption-based impacts of beef in the United States.

Using publicly available data, we present a network model of beef production-consumption for the US at the county-level. We utilize network analysis to understand the structure and robustness of the beef consumption network, and to highlight counties critical for the beef supply chain. The model is used to attribute the production locations to beef consumption elsewhere in the network. By spatially modeling the movement of beef products, we identify environmental impacts that are specific to certain consumption locations and supply chains. The environmental aspects of beef consumption are elucidated by translating the beef production-consumption network into networks of embodied virtual water, energy, and GHG emissions. Evaluating the patterns of consumption and production reveals synergistic opportunities for impact reduction and sustainable management. Preliminary results show that approximately 50 counties are responsible for half of beef cattle production in the US. Further, the counties consuming the most meat usually do not produce any, and almost 75% of the states consume more meat than they produce in terms of equivalent cattle. Analysis indicates that the network of live cattle trade is neither dense nor robust. The implications of consumption-based accounting for the sustainable management of FEW systems will be discussed.