Hazel V. Rowley

Red Meat Production in Australia: Life Cycle Assessment and Comparison with Overseas Studies

Greenhouse gas emissions from beef production are a significant part of Australias total contribution to climate change. For the first time an environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) hybridizing detailed on-site process modeling and input-output analysis is used to describe Australian red meat production. In this paper we report the carbon footprint and total energy consumption of three supply chains in three different regions in Australia over two years. The greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy use data are compared to those from international studies on red meat production, and the Australian results are either average or below average. The increasing proportion of lot-fed beef in Australia is favorable, since this production system generates lower total GHG emissions than grass-fed production; the additional effort in producing and transporting feeds is effectively offset by the increased efficiency of meat production in feedlots. In addition to these two common LCA indicators, in this paper we also quantify solid waste generation and a soil erosion indicator on a common basis.

A practical approach for estimating weights of interacting criteria from profile sets

Aggregating multi-criteria data is an important problem with many applications. Commonly-used additive aggregation methods, such as the weighted arithmetic mean, cannot account for the criteria interactions encountered in many practical multi-criteria decision problems. The Choquet integral is a suitable aggregation operator in the presence of interacting criteria. It replaces the weight vector with a fuzzy measure that models the importance of each subset or coalition of criteria, rather than just the importance of individual criteria. However, estimating the fuzzy measures in practice has been problematic. Conventional approaches are cognitively challenging for decision makers, while more recent approaches suffer from prohibitive data requirements. In this paper, we present a formulation for the weights of the Choquet integral that uses principal component analysis to account for criteria interaction. This novel unsupervised approach to estimating the required fuzzy measures overcomes the limitations of other methods. The approach is applied to two case studies in environmental and sustainability analysis, and the results are compared with those of the weighted arithmetic mean. The first case is a triple bottom line analysis of 135 Australian industry sectors evaluated against 11 criteria, while the second case is an environmental life cycle assessment of 8 alternative biosolids management options evaluated against 5 criteria. These examples demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to account for criteria interaction in these and other decision contexts.