Dr GRAHAM MCAULIFFE

BIOGRAPHY

Graham is an Environmental Scientist with a background in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Systems Thinking. His career-focus to date has largely centred on methodological improvements to LCA, including the quantification of certain uncertainties 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 were able to develop novel approaches for calculating carbon footprints of livestock systems. His experience pertaining to nLCA, which is arguably still in its infancy, has resulted in being invited to consult on a number of national and international projects and ventures.

Graham's wider academic interests cover most aspects of agri-food sustainability, including but not limited to: cradle-to-plate "hotspot" identification of various pollutants and their environmental impacts (e.g. methane's effect on global warming); development of novel and/or site-specific emission factors and quantifying their effect at the system-scale; devising new approaches to integrate spatial heterogeneity into the LCA framework, for instance using Geographical Information Systems, or GIS, to assess impacts to nature from differing farming systems at the catchment scale; exploring trade-offs between different sustainability metrics and appropriate interpretation of comparative systems analysis; merging sustainability metrics (e.g. as in nLCA) to elucidate better understandings of risks and benefits associated with different food products.