Why landscape ecologists should contribute to life cycle sustainability approaches

Abstract

Context Understanding the consequences of changes in land use and land cover is among the greatest challenges in sustainability science, yet key themes related to land cover change are often left out of sustainability assessment tools. Because sustainability teaching is expanding at a rapid rate, incorporation of interdisciplinary, rigorous, quantitative tools to distinguish sustainable and unsustainable landscape change are needed. Objective As a heuristic exercise, we contrast and synthesize two approaches to quantifying sustainability using a case study of palm oil and tropical deforestation in Borneo, Indonesia. Methods First, we use Markovian land cover change analysis (from 2000 to 2010) to estimate changes in forest cover, project these rates of change into the near future, and estimate changes in carbon stocks due to palm oil conversion. Second, we estimate greenhouse gas emissions from a typical Indonesian palm oil biodiesel plantation using a life cycle assessment approach (LCA). Results These two approaches show conflicting assessments for the carbon footprint of palm biodiesel: a sustainable endeavor when short-term global warming potential is evaluated yet highly unsustainable when rates of forest loss are measured. Furthermore, accounting for carbon that incorporated prior land cover dramatically altered sustainability assessments. Conclusions Thus, integration of these two approaches reveals the importance of including both historic and future land cover changes into sustainability assessments. This synthesis demonstrates the importance of using a plurality of approaches from different disciplines when teaching sustainability, and highlights the unique role that landscape ecological approaches can play in sustainability assessments such as LCA.

Assessment of Life Cycle Impacts on Ecosystem Services: Promise, Problems, and Prospects

“…127 Therefore, it appears that the dynamic and complex characters of ecosystems functional mechanisms, as well as the effects of landscape composition and external pressures, should be encompassed in characterization models (the varying trends in ES provision during land occupation this would potentially yield are illustrated in Figure 2b). 33,49,82,116,124 This brings back to the earlier conclusion that the use of processbased ES models at the core of characterization models should be further studied. 82,122 Nevertheless, such characterization is extremely complicated, mainly because it should generate time-dependent CFs (the value of which would vary with the time horizon considered) and would require the calculation of temporally explicit LCI flows (at least for the occurrence of transformations and the duration of occupations) and the design of prospective characterization models, all of which do not represent easy tasks.…”

“…Therefore, it appears that the dynamic and complex characters of ecosystems functional mechanisms, as well as the effects of landscape composition and external pressures, should be encompassed in characterization models (the varying trends in ES provision during land occupation this would potentially yield are illustrated in Figure b). ,,,, This brings back to the earlier conclusion that the use of process-based ES models at the core of characterization models should be further studied. , …”

“…Furthermore, since land uses are somehow modeled as independent elements of a landscape, no landscape-effect can be apprehended this way, despite the acknowledged influence of landscape composition on the provision of ES. ,, A direct consequence of this can be observed in the modeling of land transformation flows. Given the way CFs are calculated for these flows, the transformations “from” and “to” a given land cover will be characterized by opposite CFs.…”

Bridging barriers in sustainability research: Α review from sustainability science to life cycle sustainability assessment

“…Four studies attempted to adopt a transdisciplinary research approach: Oviedo and Bursztyn ( 2016) and Shakya et al (2019) focused on local actors as carriers of knowledge about their social-ecological environment, adopting a facilitating role to aid stakeholders co-generate knowledge; Benavides et al (2019) and Lindfors et al (2019) combined stakeholder knowledge and interdisciplinary methods but limitations in time and data have limited the assessment. Eddy and Gergel (2015) emphasized the need for interdisciplinarity and criticized the mere use of LCA in SA by comparatively applying LCA and landscape ecology approaches. Calleros-Islas ( 2019) focused on the adaptation of assessment tools to enable context-specific SA in places with limited data availability.…”

“…Finally, Zijp et al (2016) presented a solution-oriented, iterative sustainability assessment, whereby the selected solution was actually implemented and its outcomes evaluated after some years. These studies (16 out of 40 publications), which explicitly attempted to adopt a SS approach to SA, did not incorporate life cycle methods in the assessment process -apart from the LCA critique by Eddy and Gergel (2015). In some cases, due to time and data limitations, in other cases due to not considering the methods at all, but without acknowledging limitations of their applied approaches that could be complemented with life cycle methods.…”