Environmental impacts of national diets: Comparison of land use and water deprivation impacts in France and Tunisia

International audienceBackground and objectives: Environmental impacts of national diets are often analyzed through Carbon emissions. Nevertheless, with a life cycle vision, other impacts are to be considered and new methods and data are now available to compute water deprivation and land use impacts (Pfister et al., 2016; Vidal-Legaz et al., 2016). The objective of this study was to use an hybrid method combining economical statistics data to production ones and compute environmental potential impacts due to water deprivation and land use for the French and Tunisian diets. Methods: National nutritional enquiries were merged with the international custom data base UNComtrade and the FAOstat one. For animal products, feed composition and origin were also considered. Characterization factors for the water deprivation were the WSI factors from Pfister et al. (2009). Land use impacts were computed from the occupied surface including land occupied by animal feed crops. Then LANCA characterization factors (Beck et al., 2011; Bos et al., 2016) were applied to compute land use potential impacts. Biodiversity impacts from land use were obtained from Chaudhary et al. (2015). Results: Potential impacts were computed for the total equivalent amount of food of one person during one year in France and Tunisia. Impacts are generally one order higher (roundly 5 to 15 times) for the Tunisia diet than for the French one but food production in Tunisia has positive impacts on erosion and biotic production. Comparing food groups show the prevailing importance of the group ?meat/fish/eggs?. Conclusions: The hybrid approach allowed to consider the origin of each product in the French and Tunisian diets and to differentiate environmental potential impacts due to water deprivation and land use for each country and for each food family. Keywords (5 keywords maximum): national diet, life cycle assessment, land use, water deprivation