Advancing Integrated Environmental and Nutritional Life Cycle Assessments for Local Food Systems

Accelerating sustainable food system transitions requires spatially explicit integration of localproduction conditions and nutritional priorities, yet such assessments remain scarce, particularlyfor low- and middle-income countries. We developed an open-source, reproducible nutritionalLife Cycle Assessment model – Local Environmental and Nutritional Scoring (LENS) – andanalyzed sub-national food supply chains across six environmental impact categories in Kenyaand Rwanda. Results reveal strong context dependency: terrestrial animal products showcomparable impacts to most plant-source foods when comprehensively assessed. Enviro-nutritional efficiencies tend to be highest for wild-caught fish and seafood, pulses, fruit andvegetables from low-input systems, and lowest for starchy staples and poultry. Substantialvariation within food groups, between co-products, and across space necessitates interpretingscores at landscape level rather than as independent benchmarks for scaling production.