The inclusion of the Pollination Service in Life Cycle Assessment of Beekeeping Products

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been increasingly used for the improvement of the environmental performance of products and services, amongst which food systems. Nevertheless, amongst the food products, honey appears to have been rarely analysed by means of that methodology. Furthermore, the role of honeybees as pollinators can be regarded as one of the functions of an apiculture system and is undoubtedly of utmost importance both for natural ecosystems and agriculture. Indeed, the various ecosystems - both human managed and natural terrestrial - depend on animal (especially insect) pollinations; indeed, it is this service that is of utmost significance for a wide variety of food, mainly horticultural crops. Moreover, the importance of the animal pollination service for most crops cannot be underestimated: in its absence, for example, other inputs, such as fertilisers or labour, would have to be increased to obtain the same yield, thus involving higher costs. Therefore, by increasing agricultural productivity and production, animal pollinators guarantee a higher food supply and contribute to the socio-economic security of food availability and, thus, to food security. When implementing an LCA of an apiculture system, the pollination service can be considered as one of the functions of a multifunctional system (other functions including, e.g., the provision of honey, beeswax, etc.) and the issue of how to deal with multifunctionality in the modelling of that system should be carefully considered. This paper explores the economic value of pollination and the proposed calculation methods, as a potential basis for managing multifunctionality in LCA modelling. Furthermore, this paper builds on previous research performed by the Authors by discussing the inclusion of the service of pollination in two different types of honey (orange- and cherry-blossom) in a case-study application; more specifically, the cherry-blossom honey was analysed to test the robustness of the results previously obtained. A literature review was performed using the inter-database EBSCO Discovery Service and Google Scholar, using keywords such as (“honey” OR “bee”) AND (“lca” OR “life cycle assessment” OR “carbon footprint” OR “life cycle”) for the years 1990-2016. The results of the literature review showed that the issue of the inclusion of the pollination service in Life Cycle Thinking-related studies has been rarely addressed so far (2 results). On the other hand, several methods for the economic evaluation of the pollination service proposed in the literature have been identified via another literature review using the keywords (“honey” OR “bee”) AND “pollinat*” AND “economic value” (and their combinations) for the same years: e.g., dependence ratio, yield analysis, replacement costs, consumer surplus, producer surplus, etc. Finally, when it comes to the case studies, in order for the multifunctionality issue to be dealt with, amongst the different solutions proposed by the ISO 14044 standard, the use of economic allocation was decided, as a first instance (for its simplicity), between the main product (honey) and the pollination service, using one of the methods that were identified in the scientific literature.