Futura: A new tool for transparent and shareable scenario analysis in prospective life cycle assessment

Abstract

While it may be impossible to accurately predict what the world will look like in the future, we can be certain that it will be different from the world of today. By extension, we know that using today's data in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies claiming to represent future scenarios is problematic. For the future impact of products to be estimated in a consistent and meaningful manner in LCA, the background system, most commonly the ecoinvent database, needs to be projected into the future alongside the foreground system modeled in a given study. Futura is a new piece of open‐source software which allows LCA practitioners to create and share novel background databases representing arbitrary scenarios. It allows users to import a base database and then start making targeted changes. These changes take three main forms—adding new technologies, regionalizing new or existing technologies, and altering market compositions. All changes made are automatically added to a "recipe." This recipe file can be shared publicly. This recipe can be imported by other users and used to exactly recreate the modified database. The additive and transparent nature of this system means that initially simple scenarios can be built upon by others to progress toward more comprehensive scenarios in a stepwise manner. The inability to build on the work of others is a serious barrier to the progress of the LCA field. Futura goes some way to reduce this barrier in the field of prospective LCA.

PRospective EnvironMental Impact asSEment (premise): a streamlined approach to producing databases for prospective Life Cycle Assessment using Integrated Assessment Models

“…Finally, the tool allows for consistent and reproducible databases giving similar results regardless of the LCA software used. This last aspect echoes the work of Joyce et al [25] which demonstrates the interesting concept of recipes, used to reproduce (modified) prospective LCI databases. With such aspects being handled by premise, practitioners can focus on the foreground modeling of the product system studied.…”

Data innovation in industrial ecology

“…datasets in an open manner (Xie et al, 2021), or even earned JIE's Data Openness Badge (Agez et al, 2021;Asensio et al, 2021;Huang & Eckelman, 2020;Kerdlap et al, 2021;Sprecher et al, 2021;Vilaysouk et al, 2021). 1 Similarly, studies in this special issue contributed new open-source code (Agez et al, 2021;Joyce & Björklund, 2021) or extended open-source software from this community (Vunnava et al, 2021).…”

“…(2021) published pyLCAIO to systematically correct for incomplete system boundaries and truncation errors, across an entire LCA database, through hybridization with multiple EEIO datasets. Joyce and Björklund (2021) published Futura , to consistently adapt an entire LCA database to align with prospective scenario assumptions, notably global energy transition scenarios developed by the International Energy Agency (IEA). Both these data fusion tools thus strive to treat the LCA database as a consistent whole—rather than as a loose collection of partly unharmonized technology models—that can be linked to other macro‐models of the physical economy.…”

“…Collectively, these papers point to an evolution toward more transparent, replicable, and efficient procedures to compile geographically refined and physically detailed representations of our global economy.A similar search for transparency and consistency is guiding the development of open-source software tools to manipulate life cycle assessment (LCA) datasets Agez et al (2021). published pyLCAIO to systematically correct for incomplete system boundaries and truncation errors, across an entire LCA database, through hybridization with multiple EEIO datasets Joyce and Björklund (2021). published Futura, to consistently adapt an entire LCA database to align with prospective scenario assumptions, notably global energy transition scenarios developed by the International…”

How can LCA include prospective elements to assess emerging technologies and system transitions? The 76th LCA Discussion Forum on Life Cycle Assessment, 19 November 2020

“…In most cases, a soft link was performed where, for instance, projected efficiency gains or technology distributions in future energy mixes were transferred into LCI databases. A combination of new approaches by Mendoza-Beltran et al (2020) and Joyce and Björklund (2021) and the implementation possibilities via superstructure databases could be a way to efficiently include scenarios in a more standardized way.…”