POULTRY PRODUCTION IMPACTS: ENLARGING THE PICTURE

Simone Bastianoni, Nicoletta Patrizi and Anna Ruini
Ecodynamics Group - University of Siena. Piazzetta Enzo Tiezzi, 1 - 53100 Siena (Italy)
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INTRODUCTION
Minimizing the environmental impact of poultry industry is gaining higher interest due to raising world population and meat demand. The ONE Health approach to animal production (Alders and Tomley, 2022) and the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2015) call for a holistic approach that look at all aspects of sustainability. Usually, sustainability is depicted as the junction point of three partially intersecting circles: environment, economy, and society (Barbier, 1987); however, this representation does not explain any of the cause-effects linkages among the three components.

Therefore, we have developed a more logical/consequential sustainability representation based on an Input-State-Output (I-S-O) framework. It sets straight the economy’s dependence on societal organization, environmental resources, and ecosystem services (Pulselli et al. 2015) by showing the cause-effect relations, interactions, and feedback among the environment, society and the economy (represented in Figure 1 by arrows going backwards). The environment is society’s input; as for all living systems, consumption derives from the environment and should be under its limits. Society, which is the state of our framework, prospers if it succeeds in using in the best possible way the inputs of various kinds that derive from the environment; it organises and generates an output, the economy, that produces and distributes the goods and services needed by the society itself.
Qualitatively, feedback between the environment, society, and the economy can be positive (thus contributing to the whole system’s health and development) or negative (thus destabilising the system and potentially disrupting its development).

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