McAuliffe, G.A.

Biography

Dr Graham McAuliffe is a Reader in Environmental Impact Assessments of Food Systems at Harper Adams University (UK) with a primary background in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). His career-focus to date has largely centred on methodological advancements in LCA, including the quantification of specific uncertainties (i.e., through experimental measurements of methane and nitrous oxide) and the consideration of nutritional composition and quality within the burgeoning field of nutritional LCA (or nLCA). Utilising high-resolution data generated by the North Wyke Farm Platform, one of UKRI's National Capabilities, Graham and his colleagues developed a novel, data-driven approach for calculating carbon footprints of individual livestock. His experience pertaining to nLCA, which, as a method, is arguably still in its infancy, has resulted in being invited to consult on a number of national and international projects, including consulting for the FAO on the novelty of nLCA, as well as cautionary pitfalls pertaining to said Life Cycle frameworks. Graham's wider academic interests cover most aspects of agri-food sustainability, including but not limited to: (1) cradle-to-plate "hotspot" identification of various pollutants and their environmental impacts (e.g. methane's effect on global warming or ammonia's impact on acidification); (2) development of novel and/or site-specific emission factors as well as quantifying their effect at the system-scale; (3) devising new approaches to integrate spatial heterogeneity into the LCA framework, for instance using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to assess impacts to nature from differing farming systems at the catchment scale; (4) exploring trade-offs between different sustainability metrics and appropriate interpretation of comparative systems analysis; (5) merging sustainability metrics into a cross-pillar trade-off parcel (e.g. inclusion of Life Cycle Cost Analysis and/or inclusion of Social LCA with environmental LCA, all of which combined form the LCSA package with "S" referring to "sustainability") to elucidate better understandings of risks and benefits associated with different food products (or indeed dietary patterns); (6) identifying unintended consequences (e.g., land use change associated with displaced food production) linked to changing activities at different stages along relevant value-chains.