Downscaling material flow analysis: The case of the cereal supply chain in France

The spatial reconstruction of the production, trade, transformation and consumption flows of a specific material, can become an important decision-help tool for improving resource management and for studying environmental pressures from the producer's to the consumer's viewpoint. One of the obstacles preventing its actual use in the decision-making process is that building such studies at various geographical scales proves to be costly both in time and manpower. In this article, we propose a semi-automatic methodology to overcome this issue: we describe our multi-scalar model and its data-reconciliation component and apply it to cereal flows. Namely, using official databases (Insee, Agreste, FranceAgriMer, SitraM) as well as corporate sources, we reconstructed the supply chain flows of the 22 French regions as well as the flows of four nested territories: France, the Rhone-Alpes region, the Isere department and the territory of the SCoT of Grenoble. We display the results using Sankey diagrams and discuss the intervals of confidence of the model's outputs. We conclude on the perspectives of coupling this model with economic, social and environmental aspects that would provide key information to decision-makers. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.