Rice is a staple source of food for approximately three billion people worldwide, forming the backbone of food security in many developing nations (Lansing & Kramer, 2011). However, conventional rice production carries substantial environmental costs. Flooded paddies are the world’s largest agricultural source of methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide (Forster et al., 2007). Moreover, paddy fields frequently suffer from the overuse of fertilisers and pesticides which degrades soils and waterways, and negatively impacts biodiversity (Forster et al., 2007; Lansing & Kramer, 2011). Integrated systems, such as rice-fish or rice-prawn (RP) co-cultures, offer a promising approach to reduce environmental pressures while maintaining productivity. In Cambodia, RP farming is increasingly practiced, but its environmental performance has not been quantified, leaving policymakers and farmers without evidence to guide sustainable expansion. This MSc thesis, conducted under the discipline of Industrial Ecology, investigates the environmental impacts of RP co-culture systems in Cambodia using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. RP co-cultures represent complex socio-ecological systems, where flows of nutrients, energy, and emissions interact across the farm ecosystem. LCA allows for quantification of these interactions across the entire production chain, and scales them to a common unit of reference (functional unit), identifying trade-offs and environmental hotspots while informing strategies for sustainable intensification. While prior LCA studies have explored rice-animal systems, predominantly showing clear improvements in environmental sustainability, there is a significant research gap for RP systems in Cambodia (Wang et al., 2024). This thesis addresses that gap by collecting primary data from local farms; mapping inputs, outputs, and management practices over one agricultural season; and conducting a full LCA to quantify environmental impacts. The results showed that RP co-cultures exhibited higher environmental burden. Field-level farming operations, manure production, and diesel combustion were identified as the primary life cycle hotspots across both systems. However, when assessed per unit of economic or nutritional output, monoculture experienced higher environmental impacts for Climate Change, Land Use, and Water Use. Indeed, despite their lower productivity, RP systems produced substantially less methane per unit of output than monoculture, a meaningful climate advantage obscured by aggregated impact scores. As RP farming continues to develop in Cambodia, if co-cultures want to show genuine potential to simultaneously support smallholder livelihoods, reduce methane emissions from rice cultivation, and contribute to more sustainable food production, targeted improvements to productivity and input management need to occur. Yet, this makes them a worthwhile focus for continued investment, research, and policy support ... Read more