Biodiversity impact assessment (BIA+) – methodological framework for screening biodiversity

Abstract

For the past 20 years, the life cycle assessment (LCA) community has sought to integrate impacts on biodiversity into the LCA framework. However, existing impact assessment methods still fail to do so comprehensively because they quantify only a few impacts related to specific species and regions. This paper proposes a methodological framework that will allow LCA practitioners to assess currently missing impacts on biodiversity on a global scale. Building on existing models that seek to quantify the impacts of human activities on biodiversity, the herein proposed methodological framework consists of 2 components: a habitat factor for 14 major habitat types and the impact on the biodiversity status in those major habitat types. The habitat factor is calculated by means of indicators that characterize each habitat. The biodiversity status depends on parameters from impact categories. The impact functions, relating these different parameters to a given response in the biodiversity status, rely on expert judgments. To ensure the applicability for LCA practitioners, the components of the framework can be regionalized on a country scale for which LCA inventory data is more readily available. The weighting factors for the 14 major habitat types range from 0.63 to 1.82. By means of area weighting of the major habitat types in a country, country-specific weighting factors are calculated. In order to demonstrate the main part of the framework, examples of impact functions are given for the categories "freshwater eutrophication" and "freshwater ecotoxicity" in 1 major habitat type. The results confirm suitability of the methodological framework. The major advantages are the framework's user-friendliness, given that data can be used from LCA databases directly, and the complete inclusion of all levels of biodiversity (genetic, species, and ecosystem). It is applicable for the whole world and a wide range of impact categories. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2018;14:282-297. © 2017 SETAC.

Conceptual Framework for Biodiversity Assessments in Global Value Chains

“…The majority of LCIA methodologies focus on aspects of high vulnerability (reactive approaches), with habitat loss as proxy for species loss or the level of ecosystem degradation [66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]. Another common approach that gives priority to high vulnerability is the assessment of land use due to the occurrence of threatened species [66,69,74,75,[79][80][81]. Herein, there is a higher risk if land use takes place in an area where endangered species live.…”

“…In the context of irreplaceability, species richness is the most common metric used in LCIA methods [30,71,72,[79][80][81][87][88][89][90][91][92][93], which is followed by an assessment with regard to rare habitats or ecosystems [28,67,70,73,75,79,89,92]. Only few methods take into account the occurrence of endemic species [38,74,77,79,81]. And no method includes critical, irreplaceable biodiversity areas such as the Endemic Bird Areas, AZE sites, or Centers of Plant Diversity.…”

“…As to the knowledge of the authors, none of the methodologies use existing land use maps for both occupation and transformation to make the regionalization as accurate as possible (see refs. [67,68,[71][72][73][74][75]77,81,88,91,95]).…”

“…The majority of biodiversity methods in LCA is able to distinguish between different land use types and to assess their local impacts on biodiversity [30,68,69,71,72,74,77,[87][88][89][90][93][94][95]. Some of the methods however, only apply to one specific land use types, such as forestry [67,78], cropland [70,75,80,91], and mining [79], or do not take into account any land use type at all [81,92]. The impact of a specific type of land use is usually measured using the UNEP SETAC framework [97,115].…”

“…[78] which is only applicable for forestry. Only a few methods are able to assess specific land use management parameters and to quantify their impact on biodiversity [67,68,70,78,80,81,90,92], such as the potential field method [92] based on ref. [67].…”