A high-resolution life cycle impact assessment model for continental freshwater habitat change due to water consumption

Integration of environment and nutrition in life cycle assessment of food Items: opportunities and challenges

“…For the other areas of protection, there are also alternative pathways, but none is consensus-based and recommended yet. Complementary pathways to ecosystem quality impacts are through the species-discharge relationship (Hanafiah et al, 2011;Tendall et al, 2014) or habitat change (Damiani et al, 2021) affecting freshwater species. For resources, Milà i Canals et al (2009) focus on groundwater resources and assess its depletion through the abiotic depletion potential, as used for other abiotic resources (minerals and fossil fuels), with antimony (Sb) as the reference resource.…”

Water for energy: Characterizing co‐evolving energy and water systems under twin climate and energy system nonstationarities

“…It is intended to enable LCA to more comprehensively evaluate the impacts of water use than quantity alone would (Boulay et al, 2018). Other efforts focus on impacts other than water scarcity in general: for example, Damiani et al (2021) propose regionalized characterization factors for river habitat change potential, arguing also for mechanistic watershed and sub-watershed level modeling. They further argue that high spatial resolution in characterization factors can mitigate a lack of metadata describing where impacts from volumetric water use might occur, as the characterization factors help quantify potential uncertainty.…”

Letter to the editor re: “The scarcity-weighted water footprint provides unreliable water sustainability scoring” by

“…Water scarcity in LCA can also be addressed with reference to so-called three areas of protection, namely: human health, ecosystems, and resources. In this case, the physical meaning of a water scarcity footprint is more straightforward because the available models assess the potential damage of water consumption on human health Boulay et al, 2011;Motoshita et al, 2011;UNEP, 2016;Motoshita et al, 2018), ecosystem quality Hanafiah et al, 2011;van Zelm et al, 2011;Verones et al, 2013;Verones et al, 2017;Damiani et al, 2021) and resource depletion (Mila i Canals et al, 2008;. Therefore, the value of a water scarcity footprint based on these damage level scarcity indicators explicitly represents the damage to humans (as potential life years lost), ecosystems (as potential habitat or species loss) or resources (as potential energy requirements for desalination) due to water consumption of the product system.…”