Using the LANCA® Model to Account for Soil Quality Within LCA: First Application and Approach Comparison in Two Contrasted Tropical Case Studies

Abstract

Assessing the effect of land management on soil quality is nowadays a key environmental concern, as the soil system is linked to major ecosystem services. There is a strong methodological shortage to integrate the impact of anthropogenic pressure on the soil system within large scale environmental frameworks, such as the Life Cycle Assessment. The LANCA® method was proposed to meet this need, integrating five impact categories of soil functions and directly applicable within the Life Cycle Assessment framework. Although the most recent 2016-LANCA® version shows readiness to be integrated in this large scale environmental framework to meet the demand, it has not yet been applied and validated on case studies. This study proposes a first application of the LANCA® model on two contrasted agricultural-based case studies to share experience in implementing the model through both background and foreground approaches, to analyze the first model outputs and to provide tracks for further model improvements. The results proved that both LANCA® approaches were poorly sensitive to the agricultural land managements tested. The foreground approach was difficult to implement due to the lack of transparency of the targeted characterization factors calculation procedure. Further global sensitivity and redundancy analysis should also be proposed in order to validate the consistency of the global model.

Soil Quality Restoration during the Natural Succession of Abandoned Cattle Pastures in Deforested Landscapes in the Colombian Amazon

“…Although several indexing strategies have been implemented for assessing and monitoring soil quality in different ecosystems around the world [42,[54][55][56][57][58][59][60], none have been applied to a restoration process in Amazonian soil conditions. For example, the GISQ can discriminate well between mature forest and covers dominated by grasses (pastures and silvopastoral systems) [49] and between covers with different intensity of use [48], but it has not yet proven if it can also discriminate the soil quality among different successional stages.…”

Assessing Land Use Efficiencies and Land Quality Impacts of Renewable Transportation Energy Systems for Passenger Cars Using the LANCA® Method

“…It should be also noted that country-specific default values can in reality differ from actual site-specific values as was shown by Terranova et al (2021) [62]. There can be also differences in LANCA impacts between different geographical locations [63]. Therefore, for example, the wood biomethane case could have led to different results if the wood were from other ecoregions.…”

An applicability assessment and sensitivity analysis of land use impact models: application of the LANCA model in site-specific conditions

“…The strict dependence between erosion and slope could also be 4 observed looking at the European soil erosion map developed by Panagos (Panagos et al 2015a, b). This can be a problem when slope data are not available as is the case in some countries (Thoumazeau et al 2019) . The second more important factor is the C-factor whose influence is discussed hereafter (Sect.…”