How Community Food Action Planning Reduces greenhouse gas emissions

Community Food Action Plan is to outline strategies and actions that will implement new and expand on existing interventions to increase community residents' knowledge of and access to healthy, local food.  This section details approximate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (in kilograms of CO2 equivalency) that would result if the food action plan is fully implemented over its 5 year time frame.  For this example, we will use Fernwood, Victoria, BC Neighbourhood Food Action Plan.

For example, over five years, implementing the plan will reduce carbon dioxide output by 36 metric tons, and sequester 50 metric tons of CO2.

What does this mean?  With some approximate calculations the average Canadian produces about 4-5 metric tones a year in driving - and 22 tons a year total.

In this instance, the Community Food Action reduces 36 metric tons over 5 years - that's 7.2 metric tons a year.   Therefore, the equivalent of 2 average people giving up driving their cars over the life of the plan.

And what is sequestering?  Sequestering is taking co2 out of the atmosphere and putting it in something else.   In this particular case, trees and fruit.

The only problem is that the trees, when they die, will release their co2 back into the atmosphere - same thing with the fruit. So while it may sequester carbon in the sort-term, over 100 years the net-carbon capture will be zero. The only way to really sequester carbon would be to bury it in the mantle of the earth.

Sequestering is a little bit trickier since it only reduces CO2 in the short-term and does nothing in the long term. But, if you wanted to greenwash it you could say an additional 2-3 people not driving their cars over the life of the plan due to sequestration.

In this case, the single most impactful part of the plan is the planting of 20 fruit trees per year over the 5 years of the plan. This part of the plan will reduce carbon output by 20 metric tons, and sequester 50 metric tons over a 25 year time horizon – and will continue to do so after 25 years (without being taken into account in this report). Nearly all reductions in CO2 emissions covering all parts of the plan resulted from a reduction in food miles – the distance that food travels in order to reach the plate of consumers.

Data and estimation quality
Many elements of the plan did not lend themselves to neat calculations of CO2 reductions and therefore were left-out of the analysis entirely.   Elements left out of the analysis that never-the-less will have significant impacts on greenhouse gas reductions if fully implemented include activity items 1.3 (Food Not Lawns Campaign), 2.2 (Develop an Interactive Community Food Security Map), 2.3 (100-Mile Diet Community Dinner), 2.4 (Establish an online Fernwood Food Resource Guide), 2.5 (Increase local foods in the Good Food Box Program), and all of 3.1 through 3.6 (increase Fernwood residents' awareness of, engagement in, and capacity to address community food security).

Elements included in this analysis included items 1.1 (Fernwood Fruit Tree Project), 1.2 (Fernwood Community Centre Balcony Food Garden Demonstration Site), 1.5 (Planting of Fruit Trees), 1.6 (Establish a plan to secure City Farm site), and 2.1 (Develop a ‘Local Foods Fund’ for the Good Food Box Program. 

Most of the reductions calculated for elements 1.1, 1.2, 1.6, and 2.1 resulted from reduction of distance food travels in order to reach the plate of consumers (called food miles). This data was gleaned from a previous project of LifeCycles – the Local Food Directory (www.localfooddirectory.ca). Because of limitations in data, these calculations are known to over-estimate CO2 reductions from eating locally (see http://www.localfooddirectory.ca/foodshed/?q=node/486).

 The estimations outlined in this report therefore should be considered approximate, and are useful for gaining an appreciation of the level of magnitude that this plan will have in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Methodologies
E.g.  Fernwood Neighbourhood - City Farm
CO2 reductions for continued operation of City Farm over 5 years were calculated assuming that all fresh vegetables at the City Farm replaces equivalent product at the grocery store and reducesCO2 emissions as laid out in the Good Food Directory (see above).

E.g.  Fernwood Neighbourhood - Good Food Box
$10,000 - $20,000 is hoped to be raised per year for each year of the plan to support the Good Food Box program source local food.  It was assumed that an average of $10,000 would be used for the purchase of fresh vegetables – the rest being spent on other program implementation costs.  It was further assumed that the Good Food Box would stock its boxes with the same basket of goods as the average per capita loss-adjusted availability of fresh vegetables. (ie. The boxes are stocked in line with consumer preferences for different types of vegetables).  

Assuming that the Good Food Box also pays the average retail amount for each type of vegetable, we were able to calculate the amounts of local vegetables the Good Food Box is likely to procure with a $10,000 budget.  With these weight amounts, we ran the same food miles calculations as with the City Farm to arrive at CO2 reduction estimates.

E.g.  Fernwood Neighbourhood - Garden Creation
To calculate CO2 reduction from garden creation, we assumed that square-foot productivity and product mix would be similar to City Farm. With square-foot of garden space targets, and data from the City Farm, we were able to calculate CO2 reductions per year of garden operation.  In conversation with Coordinator of LifeCycles’ garden creation program, it was found that the mean failure rate of gardens is 15% per year, implying an average garden lifespan of 6.66 years. With these two pieces of data we where then able to calculate the total amount of CO2 reduction for the target number of gardens.

E.g.  Fernwood Neighbourhood - Fruit Tree Planting
Two impacts were considered for the planting of fruit trees – food miles reduced from the production of local fruits, and carbon sequestration due to the growth of the trees.

For calculating sequestration, standard methods using DBH Classification didn’t make sense, since so much of a fruit trees output is into fruit and not growth. Instead we used i-Tree’s tree-calculator along with estimations on fruit-yield to arrive at an approximate estimation. We calculated our impacts based on each year of planting and assumed a 5 year lag during which the tree is establishing itself, and then measured the impact out with a time-horizon of an additional 20 years.

Food Miles calculations were calculated in the same ways as above but assumed, as in sequestration, that the trees would take 5 years to establish themselves and then go on to produce fruit for 20 years.

E.g.  Fernwood Neighbourhood - Fruit Tree Project
Two impacts were also considered for the fruit tree project – food miles saved from the harvesting of local fruit, and also CO2 saved from harvesting fruit that would otherwise ferment on the ground.  The amount of CO2 produced by fermenting fruit was found to be barely significant, with the majority of savings coming from a reduction of food miles. Since we had surrogate data on gasoline consumption by the project, we took this into account, subtracting CO2 emissions produced from those saved.