Operationalising territorial life cycle inventory through the development of territorial emission factor for European agricultural land use

Abstract

demonstrate the utilisation of tEF in tLCA, and 3) explores the possibility of discriminating tEF over European countries for agricultural sector through open-access data.

Application of territorial emission factors with open-access data—a territorial LCA case study of land use for livestock production in Wallonia

“…In this direction, Nitschelm et al (2016) proposed the "Spatialized Territorial LCA" to assess an agricultural territory's environmental impacts considering the sitespecific conditions within the territory using GIS. Ding et al (2020) proposed to construct the emissions for a unit area of agricultural land use, i.e., the "territorial Emission Factor" (tEF), to facilitate linking GIS with territory LCA (Loiseau et al 2018). Note that the authors only applied the tEF to crop-specific land use (Ding et al 2020), which should be extended to integrate animal land use for a holistic application for the agricultural sector.…”

“…Ding et al (2020) proposed to construct the emissions for a unit area of agricultural land use, i.e., the "territorial Emission Factor" (tEF), to facilitate linking GIS with territory LCA (Loiseau et al 2018). Note that the authors only applied the tEF to crop-specific land use (Ding et al 2020), which should be extended to integrate animal land use for a holistic application for the agricultural sector.…”

“…These efforts are meaningful to the method development of inventory regionalization by proposing either the extrapolation strategy or guiding on using these different surrogate strategies. Ding et al (2020) explored various data sources and methods from a data availability perspective and show one possibility to discriminate the agricultural inventory with reliable open-access (i.e., freely or publicly available and reusable without restrictions) data for crop inventory in European countries. Such exploration is helpful to conduct at least the initial territorial assessment at the subnational level even in the absence of complete information (Vafi and Brandt 2014).…”

“…The overall aim of this work is to further contribute to the operationalization of territorial LCA, more specifically to facilitate the territorial LCA application by constructing the territorial inventory of agricultural sectors based on open-access data. The specific objectives of this work are (1) to expand the application of the tEF concept from crop specific land use (as in Ding et al 2020) to also cover land use for animal production, (2) to construct the territorial inventory of agricultural sectors based on open-access data only, (3) to apply these contributions to the agricultural sector in Europe, and (4) to verify the accuracy of the results calculated at the subnational level with open-access data. After the analysis of the results, we identify the major data gaps and further research points in the "Discussion" section.…”

“…After the analysis of the results, we identify the major data gaps and further research points in the "Discussion" section. Note that the current work builds on the work of Ding et al (2020) in which the concept of the territorial emission factor was proposed to operationalize the inventory stage of the territory LCA framework, and addresses the outstanding research needs in that work.…”