Summer Scholarship: Life cycle assessment of cotton-corn rotations In today's society, global warming and climate change are two of the most important issues facing all aspects of production within Australia, and throughout the world (Fischer et al. 2002). Given this broad public concern more attention is now placed on the lifecycle environmental impacts of food and fibre production (Khabbaz 2010), including the extent to which agriculture contributes to these greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and global warming. Recently new opportunities have also emerged within Australia with the introduction of carbon trading markets, such as the Carbon Farming Initiative (Dept. of Climate Change 2011). It is therefore important to have an accurate picture of the emissions profile of these agricultural industries. Australia agriculture produced an estimated 84.7 Mt carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or 15.5 % of national inventory emissions in 2009 (Dept. of Climate Change 2011), of this 31.5% is attributed to non-livestock activities such as cropping. There is a need for more detailed analysis to determine the impacts from different enterprises, with differing practices and emissions. For this project, case studies of cotton and corn were selected as they are two economically important irrigated crops in Australian agriculture. Australia's cotton sector is one of Australia's largest rural export earners, generating approximately $825 million in export revenue in the year 2006-07 (ABARE 2007), and even though the corn industry is relatively small in Australia, demand is increasing due to the added competition for the production of and animal feed and biofuels (Glover et al. 2008).