This document serves as a technical overview of the methods we use within the Coolfood Pledge to account for the climate impacts of agricultural land use. We have created this piece to help explain the integration of the carbon opportunity cost (COC) metric into our lifecycle assessments (LCAs). Carbon opportunity cost assigns climate costs based on how much total agricultural land is used for food production—and therefore how much carbon is lost from forests and other natural ecosystems to produce food.
Integrating COC into our methods, alongside agricultural supply chain emissions, provides a more comprehensive understanding of the climate costs of different commodities, and the climate benefits of shifting toward foods that have lower land use requirements.