Today is Monday, October 9, 2023
After years of work, researchers from Embrapa Meio Ambiente (São Paulo) developed a calculator to inventory agricultural products.
In tropical regions.
This is great news, especially since most similar tools currently available were designed for temperate climate conditions.
Inventories are compiled from protocols, inputs and outputs of material and energy from an agricultural process - the so-called agricultural Life Cycle Inventories (ICV) - necessary for the assessment of environmental impacts of products in Life Cycle Assessment studies (ACV). In other words, environmental accounting and sustainability analysis of agricultural activities.
The tool, which includes a new protocol - BR-Calc, applied to soybeans - adapted to the conditions of Brazilian agriculture is called ICVCalc-Embrapa, corresponding to a set of electronic spreadsheets (Excel), which organizes and processes data for construction of agricultural process inventories for LCA studies.
According to researcher Marília Folegatti, “Preparing inventories for LCA studies is extremely costly. For agricultural processes, construction is even more complex, since it is not possible to control all material and energy flows, because they occur in an open environment, and where the border between the natural environment and the production environment is sometimes blurred”. And the researcher adds “The tool is prepared to work with annual and perennial crops, with annualized input flows. The user can start with raw data, or start filling in data already organized by functional unit. The consolidated inventory of inputs and outputs of an agricultural process is the final product of ICVCalc”.
Among other things, the tool has a climate and soil database specific to the country, reaching the level of the 137 Brazilian agricultural mesoregions.
And emissions results are presented per hectare and per kilogram of product.
Click on the image below to access the complete descriptive material about the calculator, "ICVCalc: tool for constructing agricultural inventories for Life Cycle Assessment studies".
And by clicking here you can access and download ICVCalc-Embrapa, after a brief registration.
