Review of life-cycle based methods for absolute environmental sustainability assessment and their applications

Abstract

In many regions and at the planetary scale, human pressures on the environment exceed levels that natural systems can sustain. These pressures are caused by networks of human activities, which often extend across countries and continents due to global trade. This has led to an increasing requirement for methods that enable absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) of anthropogenic systems and which have a basis in life cycle assessment (LCA). Such methods enable the comparison of environmental impacts of products, companies, nations, etc, with an assigned share of environmental carrying capacity for various impact categories. This study is the first systematic review of LCA-based AESA methods and their applications. After developing a framework for LCA-based AESA methods, we identified 45 relevant studies through an initial survey, database searches and citation analysis. We characterized these studies according to their intended application, impact categories, basis of carrying capacity estimates, spatial differentiation of environmental model and principles for assigning carrying capacity. We then characterized all method applications and synthesized their results. Based on this assessment, we present recommendations to practitioners on the selection and use of existing LCA-based AESA methods, as well as ways to perform assessments and communicate results to decision-makers. Furthermore, we identify future research priorities intended to extend coverage of all components of the proposed method framework, improve modeling and increase the applicability of methods.

Diets within Environmental Limits: The Climate Impact of Current and Recommended Australian Diets

“…In recent years, planetary boundaries have emerged as an important concept in sustainability assessment [ 48 , 49 , 50 ]. This approach acknowledges that human activities inevitably have environmental impacts.…”

Carbon budgets for buildings: harmonising temporal, spatial and sectoral dimensions

“…Achieving regional or national GHG reduction targets, including the ones discussed above, is challenging and requires mitigating GHG emissions from both existing and new buildings of a chosen region or country (Giesekam, Tingley, & Cotton 2018;Röck et al 2020). Thus, it is crucial to translate these regional or national GHG reduction targets into meaningful sub-global levels (Bjoern et al 2020;Häyhä et al 2016); the building stock is one of them (Balaras et al 2007;Lavagna & Sala 2018).…”

Normalization in LCA: how to ensure consistency?

“…Seventh remark: With a normalization by planetary boundaries, the problem of consistency between inventory and reference seems solved. We have a real enthusiasm for the use of planetary boundaries in LCA (see Bjørn et al (2020) for a review), Bjørn and Hauschild (2015) being probably the most emblematic corresponding work. The principle is to use the caring capacity as a normalization value instead of the global impact.…”