Life Cycle Impact Assessment in the Arctic: Challenges and Research Needs

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly used for environmental assessment of products and production processes to support environmental decision-making both worldwide and in the Arctic. However, there are several weaknesses in the impact assessment methodology in LCA, e.g., related to uncertainties of impact assessment results, absence of spatial differentiation in characterization modeling, and gaps in the coverage of impact pathways of different "archetypal" environments. Searching for a new resource base and areas for operation, marine and marine-based industries are continuously moving north, which underlines the need for better life cycle impact assessment in the Arctic, particularly to aid in industrial environmental management systems and stakeholder communications. This paper aims to investigate gaps and challenges in the application of the currently available impact assessment methods in the Arctic context. A simplified Arctic mining LCA case study was carried out to demonstrate the relevance of Arctic emissions at the midpoint and endpoint levels, as well as possible influences of the Arctic context on the impact assessment results. Results of this study showed that significant research gaps remain in Arctic-dependent life cycle impact assessment, particularly on: (i) the possible influences of the Arctic-specific features on characterization factors for impact assessment (such as seasonality, cold climate, precipitation, and marine dependence); and (ii) the coverage of impact pathways, especially on the under-addressed marine impacts and marine/near-shore dispersion processes. Addressing those identified research gaps and demand for future Arctic life cycle impact assessment could increase the credibility of LCA as an environmental decision-making support tool for Arctic industries and better support sustainable Arctic development.

Bio-Based Production Systems: Why Environmental Assessment Needs to Include Supporting Systems

“…For some impact categories, the availability of quality data and the lack of well-established impact models are other bottlenecks. As examples, assessments of impacts on biodiversity, ESs, and water use often suffer from a lack of quality data and available impact models [9,12]. Thus, these are less likely to be included in a study, compared to other categories with less complex, or better documented, cause-effect chains [30,40,[45][46][47].…”

“…The ongoing transformation towards bio-based production, and the increasing use of biomass, is likely to lead to an economy where feedstock is produced, sourced, and processed in a variety of geographically diverse locations-even more so than in the case of current fossil supply chains [116,117]. Transformation towards a more distributed and regionalized, or even localized, economy entails an increasing degree of spatial variation across production systems that needs to be accounted for, in order to ensure that the sustainability of these systems is reliably assessed [9]. In order to achieve this, several researchers have proposed approaches where multiple assessment methods, or features from different assessment approaches, are used in combination [13,46,112,118].…”

“…Bio-based production systems are particularly sensitive to these factors, and they can significantly influence their environmental performance. For instance, seasonal food web dynamics can significantly affect biodiversity impacts from fish harvesting [9], and provisioning of ESs can be more or less affected by a stressor depending on its timing over the year [41,107]. There can be temporal delays between the time of environmental impact and the observed effect on ESs (e.g., due to variations in supply and demand for the service over time [107]), and the productivity and input requirements of a production systems can change with its age (e.g., perennial cropping systems exhibit nonlinear patterns of increasing and then decreasing yields per unit effort over their lifetime [136]).…”

“…Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has often been described as the key assessment and planning tool for this purpose [3]. LCA is one of the most commonly used tools for environmental assessment, it has been applied for environmental assessment and planning in multiple sectors globally, and it is widely used as a decision support tool for product development, environmental benchmarking, management, and policy development [3,9]. However, despite its popularity, researchers have raised concerns regarding some of the limitations and weaknesses of the LCA methodology, and worries have been expressed that, if not addressed, these limitations and weaknesses can have significant implications for the applicability and reliability of the assessments [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…LCA is one of the most commonly used tools for environmental assessment, it has been applied for environmental assessment and planning in multiple sectors globally, and it is widely used as a decision support tool for product development, environmental benchmarking, management, and policy development [3,9]. However, despite its popularity, researchers have raised concerns regarding some of the limitations and weaknesses of the LCA methodology, and worries have been expressed that, if not addressed, these limitations and weaknesses can have significant implications for the applicability and reliability of the assessments [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. For example, Reap et al [12,17], conducted an extensive literature review on unresolved problems related to LCA methods and application, and identified multiple problem areas, with potentially significant implications in terms of reliability and usefulness as a sustainability assessment tool [12,17].…”