Greenhouse gas emissions factors of land use and land-use change for French agricultural land uses and crops

The aim of the ACV Carbone project, funded by ADEME, was to develop a method to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from both direct land-use changes and land-management changes, to be implemented in Agribalyse, the French agricultural and food life cycle inventory database. The proposed method uses spatially explicit land-conversion data at the departmental scale with a shared-responsibility allocation approach and regionalised carbon stocks, in line with recent developments in carbone accounting methods for life cycle assessment. We calculated three types of emissions factor (EF) per unit area associated with land use and land-use change : (i) specific EFs when the department of production and previous land use are known (for five agricultural land-use categories, 14 previous land-use categories and 94 departments), (ii) mean departmental EFs when the department of production is known but previous land use is not (for five agricultural land-use categories and 94 departments) and (iii) mean supra-departmental EFs when the department of production and previous land use are unknown (for more than 80 crops and 178 variants at the national scale). The EFs are consistent with international life cycle assessment and carbon accounting guidelines for land use and land-use change, but carbon dioxide removals must be excluded. We recommend using these EFs to assess the climate change impacts of agricultural products.