Erica Dorr’s PhD defence

Her jury is composed of Eléonore Loiseau from INRAE (Occitanie-Montpellier centre), Natacha Gondran from Mines Saint-Etienne, Haissam Jijakli from Université de Liège (Belgium), Bruno Peuportier from Mines ParisTech, Alexi Ernstoff from Quantis (Suisse), Arpad Horvath from University of California (Berkeley, US), Benoit Gabrielle from AgroParisTech – Université Paris-Saclay (Thesis director) and Christine Aubry from INRAE – Université Paris-Saclay (Thesis co-director).

The global food system causes massive environmental impacts, and faces the challenge of feeding an even larger, more urbanized population in the coming decades. Urban agriculture (UA) is a type of alternative agriculture, which may have environmental and social benefits, and comes in a large diversity of forms. These environmental benefits and impacts can be modeled with life cycle assessment (LCA). Application of LCA to UA is relatively recent, and has not undergone the same methodological reflections and adaptations that LCA of other sectors has.

In her thesis project, Erica Dorr pursued the following goals :

1. investigating what LCA tells us about the environmental performance of UA, and
2. investigating how best to apply LCA to UA.

She performed a review and meta-analysis of UA LCAs, and reviewed literature on the development of LCA for agriculture in general. She did LCAs of nine urban farms and gardens in Paris, France and the Bay Area, California, USA, and (with the FEW-meter project) analyzed resource use and food production at 72 UA case studies. She finally summarized and generated knowledge on the environmental performance of UA, and created a methodological framework to improve consistency and completeness in UA LCAs.