Characterization Factors to Assess Land Use Impacts on Pollinator Abundance in Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

While wild pollinators play a key role in global food production, their assessment is currently missing from the most commonly used environmental impact assessment method, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This is mainly due to constraints in data availability and compatibility with LCA inventories. To target this gap, relative pollinator abundance estimates were obtained with the use of a Delphi assessment, during which 25 experts, covering 16 nationalities and 45 countries of expertise, provided scores for low, typical, and high expected abundance associated with 24 land use categories. Based on these estimates, this study presents a set of globally generic characterization factors (CFs) that allows translating land use into relative impacts to wild pollinator abundance. The associated uncertainty of the CFs is presented along with an illustrative case to demonstrate the applicability in LCA studies. The CFs based on estimates that reached consensus during the Delphi assessment are recommended as readily applicable and allow key differences among land use types to be distinguished. The resulting CFs are proposed as the first step for incorporating pollinator impacts in LCA studies, exemplifying the use of expert elicitation methods as a useful tool to fill data gaps that constrain the characterization of key environmental impacts.

Pollination supply models from a local to global scale

“…The results obtained at different biomes show that the MM, at least for other wild bees, works best in biomes dominated by temperate or Mediterranean forests. The input table was made from expert opinion by co-authors of this work with no differentiation between biomes, based on global pollinator abundance scores per land cover type (Alejandre et al, 2023). As highlighted by Gardner et al (2020), expert-based tables can also suffer from different types of bias.…”

“…Thus, we tested the performance of two different tables of floral and nesting suitability across different land cover types based on expert opinion. First, we used the coordinated assessment of three leading experts in ecology (Ignasi Bartomeus, Francisco de Paula Molina and Ainhoa Magrach), who based the scores on their extensive experience and the values obtained by the global assessment by Alejandre et al (2023) for several basic land cover types. We apply the lookup table to a land cover map with continuous fields (each pixel describes the percentage of each land cover type; see Table E1).…”