Accounting for Ecosystem Services in Life Cycle Assessment, Part II: Toward an Ecologically Based LCA

Abstract

Despite the essential role of ecosystem goods and services in sustaining all human activities, they are often ignored in engineering decision making, even in methods that are meant to encourage sustainability. For example, conventional Life Cycle Assessment focuses on the impact of emissions and consumption of some resources. While aggregation and interpretation methods are quite advanced for emissions, similar methods for resources have been lagging, and most ignore the role of nature. Such oversight may even result in perverse decisions that encourage reliance on deteriorating ecosystem services. This article presents a step toward including the direct and indirect role of ecosystems in LCA, and a hierarchical scheme to interpret their contribution. The resulting Ecologically Based LCA (Eco-LCA) includes a large number of provisioning, regulating, and supporting ecosystem services as inputs to a life cycle model at the process or economy scale. These resources are represented in diverse physical units and may be compared via their mass, fuel value, industrial cumulative exergy consumption, or ecological cumulative exergy consumption or by normalization with total consumption of each resource or their availability. Such results at a fine scale provide insight about relative resource use and the risk and vulnerability to the loss of specific resources. Aggregate indicators are also defined to obtain indices such as renewability, efficiency, and return on investment. An Eco-LCA model of the 1997 economy is developed and made available via the web (www.resilience.osu.edu/ecolca). An illustrative example comparing paper and plastic cups provides insight into the features of the proposed approach. The need for further work in bridging the gap between knowledge about ecosystem services and their direct and indirect role in supporting human activities is discussed as an important area for future work.

UNEP-SETAC guideline on global land use impact assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services in LCA

“…Moreover, only preliminary studies explicitly discuss ecosystem services in LCA (Maes et al 2009;Zhang et al 2010a, b;Bare 2011) and this concept generally refers to life support functions (de Groot 1992;de Groot et al 2002) introduced early into LCA (e.g. Udo de Haes et al 2002;Antón et al 2007;Milà i Canals 2007b).…”

Design of Sustainable Biofuel Processes and Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Data at this scale often do not include the use phase of the life cycle. Recently, Bakshi and colleagues have developed Ecologically-based Life Cycle Assessment (EcoLCA), an environmentally extended input-output life cycle model capable of accounting for the consumption/role of ecosystem goods and services in a life cycle framework [108,109]. The EcoLCA model extends the traditional I-O framework to consider the direct and indirect environmental impacts that result from economic activities; including ecological and natural resource consumption, emissions, land-use, and other environmental impact categories [110][111][112].…”

“…Examples of ecological goods and services include: timber, food, water, energy resources, clean air, minerals and ores, purification of air and water resources, flood and drought mitigation, pollination of crops and vegetation, maintenance of global biodiversity, as well as climate and disease regulation [146][147][148]. Since it is computationally intractable to model the complete supply chain by including each process as done at the life cycle level of analysis, the approach leveraged at this scale of analysis is closely related to existing hybrid (i.e., tiered) LCA methods in which a process level model is used to determine process level consumption of ecological goods and services while economy wide-impacts are incorporated using EcoLCA [108,109,112,116,149].…”

Integrated Metrics for Improving the Life Cycle Approach to Assessing Product System Sustainability

“…These metrics are not recommended here as they are based on similar principles and expected to provide similar signals to the selected metrics and yet are less developed for a product systems context: HANPP is based on a principle of bioproductivity like ecological footprint; exergy is another thermodynamics-based measure of system condition that has been used alongside [72] or independently of emergy to evaluate product systems but does not capture energy transformations in the biosphere; measures of system resilience or order based on ecological network theory are more challenging to compute and less proven for technical systems than Fisher Information. Although an adequate metric has not been identified, there is still a need for an integrated metric that provides an indication of system condition, based on social and ethical expectations and norms that more firmly captures aspects of social responsibility than the metrics proposed here, as this perspective is widely acknowledged to be of great importance to sustainability of global supply chains [73].…”

“…Three of these metrics have already been demonstrated, in a limited number of applications, to be computable for product systems. EME theory has been used to develop LCIA methods under various names, including emergy [50], solar energy demand [48], and ecological cumulative exergy consumption [72]. A first attempt to develop EF method into a set of LCIA characterization factors was done by Huijbregts and colleagues [9] for the EcoInvent LCA database.…”