Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: findings of the scoping phase

Jolliet, Olivier; Frischknecht, Rolf; Bare, Jane; Boulay, Anne‐Marie; Bulle, Cécile; Fantke, Peter; Gheewala, Shabbir H.; Hauschild, Michael Zwicky; Itsubo, Norihiro; Margni, Manuele; McKone, Thomas E.; Canals, Llorenç Mila Y; Postuma, Leo; Prado, Valentina; Ridoutt, Bradley G.; Sonnemann, Guido; Rosenbaum, Ralph K.; Seager, Tom; Struijs, Jeroen N.; Zelm, Rosalie van; Vigon, Bruce; Weisbrod, Anne V.

doi:10.1007/s11367-014-0703-8

Cited by 68 publications

(56 citation statements)

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“…Following initial scoping workshops in 2012 and 2013 and a stakeholder consultation, the effort has been focused in a first stage on impacts of global warming, fine particulate matter, water use impacts and land use impacts on biodiversity (Jolliet et al 2014), plus cross-cutting issues and LCA-based footprints. A first Pellston workshop TM is planned for January 2016 to issue recommendations for these categories 1 .…”

Section: Global Guidance On Lcia Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: progress and case study

Frischknecht

Fantke

Tschümperlin

et al. 2016

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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115

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Purpose The life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) guidance flagship project of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative aims at providing global guidance and building scientific consensus on environmental LCIA indicators. This paper presents the progress made since 2013, preliminary results obtained for each impact category, and the description of a rice life cycle assessment (LCA) case study designed to test and compare LCIA indicators. MethodsThe effort has been focused in a first stage on impacts of global warming, fine particulate matter emissions, water use and land use, plus cross-cutting issues and LCA-based footprints. The paper reports the process and progress and specific results obtained in the different task forces (TF). Additionally, a rice LCA case study common to all TF has been developed. Three distinctly different scenarios of producing and cooking rice have been defined and underlined with life cycle inventory data. These LCAs help testing impact category indicators which are being developed and/or selected in the harmonisation process. The rice LCA case study further helps to ensure the practicality of the finally recommended impact category indicators. ResultsThe global warming TF concludes that analysts should explore the sensitivity of LCA results to metrics other than GWP. The particulate matter TF attained initial guidance of how to include health effects from PM 2.5 exposures consistently into LCIA. The biodiversity impacts of land use TF suggests to consider complementary metrics besides species richness for assessing biodiversity loss. The water use TF is evaluating two stress-based metrics, AWaRe and an alternative indicator by a stakeholder consultation. The cross-cutting issues TF agreed upon maintaining DALY as endpoint unit for the safeguard subject "human health". The footprint TF defined main attributes that should characterise all footprint indicators. "Rice cultivation" and "Cooking" stages of the rice LCA case study contribute most to the environmental impacts assessed. ConclusionsThe results of the TF will be documented in white papers and some published in scientific journals. These white papers represent the input for the Pellston workshop TM , taking place in Valencia, Spain from 24 to 29 January 2016, where best practice, harmonised LCIA indicators and an update on the general LCIA framework will be discussed and agreed on. With the diversity in results and the multi-tier supply chains the rice LCA case study is well suited to test candidate recommended indicators and to ensure their applicability in common LCA case studies.

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Section: Global Guidance On Lcia Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: progress and case study

Frischknecht

Fantke

Tschümperlin

et al. 2016

Int J Life Cycle Assess

Self Cite

115

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“…It presents a series of water scarcity footprint examples which are simply not directly comparable, because the characterization models have different scales and ranges, and are based on different modeling choices, with some more human health or ecosystem quality oriented (Boulay et al 2014). The need for a consensus-based method emerged from method developers and several environmental label and declaration initiatives wishing to use global metrics and ensure comparability (Galatola and Pant 2014;ISO 14046 2014;Boulay et al 2015b) and was identified as priority by the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative (Jolliet et al 2014). The Water Use in LCA (WULCA) Working Group took over this task by bringing together method developers and experts in LCA, hydrology, and ecology from academia, public and private sectors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The WULCA consensus characterization model for water scarcity footprints: assessing impacts of water consumption based on available water remaining (AWARE)

Boulay

Bare

Benini

et al. 2017

Int J Life Cycle Assess

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568

381

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Purpose Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been used to assess freshwater-related impacts according to a new water footprint framework formalized in the ISO 14046 standard. To date, no consensus-based approach exists for applying this standard and results are not always comparable when different scarcity or stress indicators are used for characterization of impacts. This paper presents the outcome of a 2-year consensus building process by the Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment (WULCA), a working group of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, on a water scarcity midpoint method for use in LCA and for water scarcity footprint assessments. Methods In the previous work, the question to be answered was identified and different expert workshops around the world led to three different proposals. After eliminating one proposal showing low relevance for the question to be -017-1333-8 answered, the remaining two were evaluated against four criteria: stakeholder acceptance, robustness with closed basins, main normative choice, and physical meaning.Results and discussion The recommended method, AWARE, is based on the quantification of the relative available water remaining per area once the demand of humans and aquatic ecosystems has been met, answering the question BWhat is the potential to deprive another user (human or ecosystem) when consuming water in this area?^The resulting characterization factor (CF) ranges between 0.1 and 100 and can be used to calculate water scarcity footprints as defined in the ISO standard.Conclusions After 8 years of development on water use impact assessment methods, and 2 years of consensus building, this method represents the state of the art of the current knowledge on how to assess potential impacts from water use in LCA, assessing both human and ecosystem users' potential deprivation, at the midpoint level, and provides a consensusbased methodology for the calculation of a water scarcity footprint as per ISO 14046.

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“…A model linking land use to species loss has been proposed by Chaudhary et al [69]; it has been recommended by the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative [70] as an interim indicator of genetic diversity, given its comprehensive global coverage. This model uses Species-Area Relationships (SAR) to express vulnerability as the ratio of threatened endemic richness (number of 'irreplaceable' species) to the total species richness hosted by the region [71]. However, whilst Chaudhary et al's [69] indicator estimates potential species loss at regional and global scales, it does not suggest boundaries for the maximum species loss that would mark potentially critical species-loss fractions.…”

Section: Practicality Of Applying Indicators Of Biosphere Integritymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Challenges of Applying Planetary Boundaries as a Basis for Strategic Decision-Making in Companies with Global Supply Chains

et al. 2017

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Abstract:The Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework represents a significant advance in specifying the ecological constraints on human development. However, to enable decision-makers in business and public policy to respect these constraints in strategic planning, the PB framework needs to be developed to generate practical tools. With this objective in mind, we analyse the recent literature and highlight three major scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the PB approach in decision-making: first, identification of thresholds or boundaries with associated metrics for different geographical scales; second, the need to frame approaches to allocate fair shares in the 'safe operating space' bounded by the PBs across the value chain and; third, the need for international bodies to co-ordinate the implementation of the measures needed to respect the Planetary Boundaries. For the first two of these challenges, we consider how they might be addressed for four PBs: climate change, freshwater use, biosphere integrity and chemical pollution and other novel entities. Four key opportunities are identified: (1) development of a common system of metrics that can be applied consistently at and across different scales; (2) setting 'distance from boundary' measures that can be applied at different scales; (3) development of global, preferably open-source, databases and models; and (4) advancing understanding of the interactions between the different PBs. Addressing the scientific and technical challenges in operationalizing the planetary boundaries needs be complemented with progress in addressing the equity and ethical issues in allocating the safe operating space between companies and sectors.

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Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: findings of the scoping phase

Cited by 68 publications

References 10 publications

Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: progress and case study

Global guidance on environmental life cycle impact assessment indicators: progress and case study

The WULCA consensus characterization model for water scarcity footprints: assessing impacts of water consumption based on available water remaining (AWARE)

The Challenges of Applying Planetary Boundaries as a Basis for Strategic Decision-Making in Companies with Global Supply Chains

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