Bio-Based Production Systems: Why Environmental Assessment Needs to Include Supporting Systems

Abstract

The transition to a bio-based economy is expected to deliver substantial environmental and economic benefits. However, bio-based production systems still come with significant environmental challenges, and there is a need for assessment methods that are adapted for the specific characteristics of these systems. In this review, we investigated how the environmental aspects of bio-based production systems differ from those of non-renewable systems, what requirements these differences impose when assessing their sustainability, and to what extent mainstream assessment methods fulfil these requirements. One unique characteristic of bio-based production is the need to maintain the regenerative capacity of the system. The necessary conditions for maintaining regenerative capacity are often provided through direct or indirect interactions between the production system and surrounding “supporting” systems. Thus, in the environmental assessment, impact categories affected in both the primary production system and the supporting systems need to be included, and impact models tailored to the specific context of the study should be used. Development in this direction requires efforts to broaden the system boundaries of conventional environmental assessments, to increase the level of spatial and temporal differentiation, and to improve our understanding of how local uniqueness and temporal dynamics affect the performance of the investigated system.

A framework for implementing holistic and integrated life cycle sustainability assessment of regional bioeconomy

“…This potential can be further unlocked when quantitative environmental cause and effect chains in regard to absolute sustainability assessment methods are further developed and implemented in LCSA. A sustainable bioeconomy requires that the rate of extraction does not exceed the rate of regeneration and that this regenerativity and the surrounding supporting systems are maintained (Lindqvist et al 2019). Currently under development are planetary boundary LCIAs (Ryberg et al 2018) addressing challenges of relating LCIs and LCIAs to operational definitions of planetary boundaries (Robert et al 2020).…”

“…Rather, the goal is to avoid a piecemeal approach to sustainable transformation and the capability of delivering a holistic picture on trade-offs, synergies, hotspots, significant risks, and chances as well as a fundamental understanding (Zeug et al 2020). In addition, more indicators do not necessarily lead to a better quality necessarily, but an adequate impact category coverage is of particular importance (Lindqvist et al 2019). The 109 possbile indicators are already quite much compared to most other studies and potential data availability.…”

Life cycle assessment (LCA): informing the development of a sustainable circular bioeconomy?

“…Ecosystem services (ES) have also been integrated in LCA studies because of their importance for the sustainable circular bioeconomy not only in terms of ecological sustainability and the intrinsic value of biodiversity, but also in ensuring high productivity, maintaining regenerative capacity and ensuring the resilience of biobased production systems [9,[48][49][50][51][52].…”

“…Similarly, the integration of multiple environmental impacts is needed to avoid burden shifting and different LCA modelling principles can facilitate decision-making in different contexts and scales (e.g. consequential or attributional LCA) [8,9,[27][28][29]32,61].…”

“…However, environmental LCA also present some inherent limitations related to complex modelling, blurred or inconsistent boundary setting, short-time horizons during which the outputs are considered to be valid, budget, data availability, trends in politics, research, lack of well-established impact models and selective or partial application of LCA methodology. Any or all of these limitations can be a reason for controversy and rejection of LCA results [8,9]. These are particularly important for the assessment of biobased systems that are often complex combinations of technologies and practices over geographically dispersed and long distances and with wide and uncertain sets of indicators [10].…”