Agricultural food production systems are essential to face current and future climate, food security and nutrition challenges. Several novel urban agriculture production concepts are utilizing symbiotic production and distributed/urban production principles to address these challenges. Life cycle engineering can support the planning and design of production systems and help to identify hotspots and avoid problem shifting.

In this work the authors identify the factors resulting from symbiotic, distributed and enclosed food production, influencing life cycle inventory modelling for life cycle assessment. Based on the influencing factors a life cycle inventory modelling framework is proposed and the application pathway is illustrated by an in-development production system called CUBES Circle.