Soil quality index: Exploring options for a comprehensive assessment of land use impacts in LCA

Abstract

Impacts associated with land use are increasingly recognized as important aspects to consider when conducting Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Across the existing models accounting for land use activities in life cycle impact assessment, a balance is yet to be found between complexity and comprehensiveness on one hand, and applicability on the other hand. This work builds on the LANd use indicator value CAlculation (LANCA ® ) model, assessing the impacts of land use activities on five soil properties, and aims at developing an aggregated index to improve its applicability. First a statistical analysis is conducted, leading to the shortlisting of the four most significant soil quality indicators. Then two options for aggregating the selected indicators are presented: the soil quality index (SQI), based on linear aggregation, and the normalisation–based soil quality index (NSQI), where the aggregation process involves normalisation integrated into the characterisation step. Country-specific and global average characterisation factors (CFs) are calculated for 57 land use types considering both land occupation and land transformation interventions with the two suggested approaches. The two indices present similar ranking of land use types but the relative contribution of the separate indicators to the aggregated index varies according to the approach adopted. The differences between the aggregation approaches suggested are discussed, together with the limitations related to both the LANCA ® model and the aggregation approaches. This work represents a first step towards the widespread application of a comprehensive and robust land use model at midpoint level in LCA. Finally, a number of recommendations for the future development of the LANCA ® model and of the related soil quality models are provided.

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

“…The same impact assessment model and metrics of the EF 2.0 were implemented for the different impact categories, apart from land use (detailed in section 2.2.2 ). For the land use category, the same underpinning model of the EF 3.0 was applied, namely the updated version of the LANCA model ( Horn and Maier, 2018 ) as in De Laurentiis et al (2019) . However, as explained hereinafter only the soil erosion impact was quantified.…”

Prospects of Bioenergy Cropping Systems for A More Social-Ecologically Sound Bioeconomy

“…However, even though LCA is widely used, several aspects are still missing, which would be of particular importance for the assessment of the BCSs on marginal land discussed in the current study. Herewith, especially soil quality [276] and the impact of different agricultural systems on the biodiversity [277] are crucial aspects that are not fully included in the current methodologies. In addition, it is crucial to assess whole crop rotations, however, currently, often only the environmental performance of individual crops is analyzed [278].…”

A soil quality index for evaluation of degradation under land use and soil erosion categories in a small mountainous catchment, Iran

“…The use of MDS recognises that no single property can provide a comprehensive measurement of soil quality (Garrigues et al 2012;Masto et al 2008;Wienhold et al 2004;Yu et al 2018b). Many studies use normalisation of indicator scores on the basis of linear or non-linear scoring functions (D'Hose et al 2014;Sharma et al 2005) and integrate the normalised indicators into SQIs using additive or multiplicative techniques (D'Hose et al 2014;De Laurentiis et al 2019;Lima et al 2013;Masto et al 2008;Sharma et al 2005). The statistical tests for confirming MDS include, amongst others, PCA and varimax rotation followed by simple linear regression (Juhos et al 2016), cluster analysis (Dilly et al 2018) and correlation, PCA and discriminant function analysis (DFA) (Juhos et al 2019).…”