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Benjamin McKeown

Does it really take 20,000L of water to produce 1kg of beef? - Beef Central - 0 views

www.beefcentral.com/...f-water-to-produce-1kg-of-beef

water food energy Nexus water water footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 13 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • These were his calculations: “Say a two year old grassfed steer dresses 300kg and Lean Meat Yield is 60 percent. Therefore 180kg of beef is produced. Say the animal drinks 40 litres /day (generous) for 730 days. That equals 29,200 litres divided by 180kg = 162 litres per kilogram.
  • However, while that statement was referenced in the report, the specific reference was missing from the list of references at the end of the report.
  • In the article Professor Hoekstra actually wrote that producing one kilogram of boneless beef required about 155 litres of water, taking into account only the water used for drinking and servicing that animal. However, when you added in 1300kg of grain, 7200kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), and the water required to grow those feed sources, he said the water footprint of 1 kg of beef would add up to 15,500 litres of water.
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  • Professor Hoekstra, from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, is the inventor of the Water Footprint concept, a method used to account for the total amount of water used to produce something.
  • Dr Perry said calculation procedures adopted in most estimates of water footprints are flawed, and that water footprints are incorrectly assessed on an absolute rather than a relative bas
  • A key concern was that ‘Water Footprints’ made no allowance for whether a producing area is water- plentiful or water-short.
  • “One must consider the scarcity or abundance of water and land, as well as downstream water uses to evaluate the significance of any environmental impact when compared to the status of these variables in the absence of grain or meat production. Simply comparing the water footprints of grain and meat does not provide helpful environmental information.
  • “It is overly simplistic and misleading to suggest that water footprints should be reduced without considering the context and purpose of water use.” “…Generalised water footprints are neither accurate nor helpful indicators for gaining a better understanding of water resource management.”
  • Previous media articles have reported claims that it takes between 50,000 and 100,000 litres to produce a kilogram of red meat. But these reported measures count every single drop of water that falls on an area of land grazed by cattle over the space of a year. And they do not take into account the fact that most of the water ends up in waterways, is used by trees and plants and in pastures, not grazed by cattle. “These calculations therefore attribute all rain that falls on a property to beef production, whereby the water is clearly being used for other purposes, such as supporting ecosystems” MLA explains in its Target 100 page.
Benjamin McKeown

Admit it: we can't measure our ecological footprint | New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...asure-our-ecological-footprint

ecological footprint

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • “when humanity exhausted nature’s budget for the year” and began “drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere”. This year it was on 20 August, the earliest date yet.
  • “so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context,” it says in a paper in PLoS Biology.
  • The footprint analysis does not really measure our overuse of the planet’s resources at all. If anything, it underestimates it.
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  • It does this by measuring the productive land and sea area available – cropland and pasture, forests and fishing grounds – and matching that against the demands placed on them. This biological accountancy system concludes that planet Earth has a biocapacity of 12 billion hectares, and a human demand equivalent to 18 billion hectares. Hence the 1.5 Earths figure. Our footprint is 50 per cent too big.
  • I had assumed that the analysis assessed the damaging environmental consequences of how we use the land – things like soil erosion and the overuse of water reserves. But no. It only measures land area.
  • “Local ecosystem abuse is a significant problem [but] to make reliable adjustments would require data sets that do not exist,” he writes. Or, as he told me: “Our current accounts cannot include soil erosion. Hence cropland use equals cropland availability.”
  • It uses UN statistics to compare the timber we harvest against annual growth. The conclusion is that, while we are deforesting some areas, growth elsewhere more than makes up for the loss. This is reflected in a surplus in the accounts.
  • If the calculation is to be believed, while some fish stocks are being over-exploited, a greater number are under-exploited and overall fish biomass is increasing. That’s another surplus
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