Regionalized LCA in practice: the need for a universal shapefile to match LCI and LCIA
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COMMENTARY AND DISCUSSION ARTICLE
Regionalized LCA in practice: the need for a universal shapefile to match LCI and LCIA Stephan Pfister 1
&
Christopher Oberschelp 1 & Thomas Sonderegger 1
Received: 16 June 2020 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Keywords Regionalization . LCA . LCIA . Water footprint . Biodiversity footprint . Soil impacts . PM emissions
1 The regionalization challenge Life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental footprints studies have become prominent tools to assess environmental impacts of products, services, companies, and regions, including the impacts over global supply chains. Many impact categories require regional differentiation for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), but also require regionally explicit life cycle inventory (LCI) data for emissions, water consumption, and land use. There have been many methodological developments to assess such impacts at a regional scale, such as for water scarcity on a watershed-level or land use impacts on an ecoregion-level (Jolliet et al. 2018). Furthermore, a broad range of regional life cycle inventory (LCI) data has been provided, e.g., for land, water, and air emissions (e.g., Pfister et al. 2011, Núñez and Finkbeiner 2020, Sonderegger et al. 2020a, Scherer and Pfister 2015, Raptis et al. 2016, Oberschelp et al. 2019, Raptis et al. 2020, Quantis 2020). Recently, a working group of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative published a paper on regionalization, in which several useful recommendations have been made (Mutel et al. 2019). However, the group identified a gap in linking LCI and LCIA data due to the various spatial scales used in practical applications, which currently limits regionalized LCAs largely to research studies. A recent symposium on regionalization further revealed the need for a pragmatic solution to integrate regionalization into LCA (Frischknecht et al. 2019).
Communicated by Matthias Finkbeiner * Stephan Pfister [email protected] 1
Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8039 Zurich, Switzerland
One key reason for this gap is the diversity of regional scales (e.g., ecoregions or watersheds) for different life cycle inventories and impact assessment methods. We therefore argue for an agreed upon universal spatial layer that captures the most important features required for impact assessment and environmental footprinting, in addition to political units that are relevant for LCI. This is important for mainstream applications of regionalized methods; many of which have been published in this journal but are currently underutilized due to applicability limitations.
2 A universal shapefile We suggest using a shapefile that intersects six spatial layers of general relevance for LCA (Fig. 1): (1) political borders, which are primarily important for LCI data and coupling with multi-regional-input-output (MRIO) data for assessing background systems; (2) terrestrial ecoregions, which are the recommended spatial unit for land use assessment (Jolliet et al. 2018) and relevant for other LCIA me
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