Spain, especially in Catalonia and Andalusia, is experiencing droughts and water scarcity. During these dry periods, water levels in rivers, lakes, and streams decrease, concentrating pollutants and nutrients that reach the Mediterranean Sea, the Cantabrian Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. This concentration can worsen acidification and eutrophication, damaging aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, effective water management is crucial to mitigate the impacts…
Ensuring enough food for the world’s growing population, while reducing impacts on the environment, is one of the main challenges of the 21st century (UN, 2015). Food systems are responsible for 23-42% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2022). Overall, GHGs before and after agricultural production reached 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2eq) globally in 2020,…
Analysis of COP28 by Sahar Azarkamand, ARECO Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF Sahar Azarkamand, postdoctoral researcher at the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF and ARECO Postdoctoral Research Fellow, has attended the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, better known…
By Sahar Azarkamand, researcher of the ARECO Fellowship of the UNESCO Chair on Life Cycle If the world’s population were to reach between 9.4 and 10.2 billion by 2050, it would require resources equivalent to almost three planets to sustain our current way of life. This underscores the need for improvements in all our resource management systems (UN, 2017). Packaging…
Climate change is increasingly recognized as a major challenge. There is broad consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are having a negative impact on the environment. The term carbon footprint is commonly used to describe the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for which an individual or organization is responsible. Footprints can also be calculated for services…
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development seeks to halve per capita food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses (SDG target 12.3) (UN, 2015). Achieving this target would have significant implications in the fight against climate change. According to FAO, food loss and waste account for…
Sahar Azarkamand, researcher of the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (ESCI-UPF), will start leading the postdoctoral research fellowship that ARECO signed two years ago with the Chair. The aim of this grant is to promote research projects on the circularity of packaging in agri-food distribution, as well as other scientific developments to…
A great advantage of using Reusable Plastic Crates (RPCs) to distribute fresh produces is their lifespan. For instance, 100,668 of RPCs are needed to distribute 100 thousand tonnes of vegetables and fruits in Spain, instead of 6.6 million of single-use cardboard boxes (Bala and Fullana-i-Palmer, 2017). This significantly reduces the need of material and energy to manufacture new single-use crates,…
