Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the flagship analytical tool in the Industrial Ecology “toolbox”, with a history of 30 years of practical application in both industry and government, and a global and growing body of practitioners in industry and academia.
LCA points to opportunities for:
The LCA approach’s initiation and development has been steered by the goal of avoiding “burden-shifting” from one environmental problem to another, or from one life cycle stage to another. Even with LCA’s challenging breadth, LCA-based inquiries can miss burden shifting within the realm of sustainable development, and can also miss opportunities for greater progress on sustainable development goals. The first required expansion is to include outcomes of an economic and social nature in addition to the current environmentally-related “Areas of Protection” which are used in LCA. The second required expansion relates to the framing of the question itself: Rather than take product-based delivery of a function as the pivot point of the analysis, we propose to quantitatively examine alternative ways that decisions alter the levels of satisfaction of fundamental and rather universal human needs for target shares of populations within societies.
In this paper we summarize the need for such an expanded framework, which we term Life Cycle Sustainable Development (LCSD). Next, we explore the feasibility of establishing an expanded set of “Areas of Protection” which address the scope of sustainable development; we suggest that one solution to this challenge may lie in recently proposed frameworks of core economic needs. Then we articulate the concept of need-required income (NRI) and summarize the results of recent analyses of NRI and its evolution over time. Finally, we propose an analytical approach for LCSD: main data sources and modeling methods which, in combination, can provide a capability for identifying and evaluating choices, from the level of individual to society, in terms of their consequences for levels of core human need satisfaction in the present and future.
Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods can be grouped into two families: classical methods determining impact category indicators at an intermediate position of the impact pathways (e.g. ozone depletion potentials) and damage-oriented methods aiming at more easily interpretable results in the form of damage indicators at the level of the ultimate societal concern (e.g. human health damage). The Life Cycle Initiative, a joint project between UNEP1 and SETAC2, proposes a comprehensive LCA framework to combine these families of methods. The new framework takes a world-wide perspective, so that LCA will progress towards a tool meeting the needs of both developing and developed countries. By a more precise and broadly agreed description of main framework elements, the Life Cycle Initiative expects to provide a common basis for the further development of mutually consistent impact assessment methods.
Inputs to the LCIA midpoint-damage framework are results of Life Cycle Inventory analyses (LCI). Impact pathways connect the LCI results to the midpoint impact categories with the corresponding indicators, as well as to the damage categories at the level of damages to human health, natural environment, natural resources and man-made environment, via damage indicators. Mid-point impact categories simplify the quantification of these impact pathways where various types of emissions or extractions can be aggregated due to their comparable impact mechanisms. Depending on the available scientific information, impact pathways may be further described up to the level of damage categories by quantitative models, observed pathways or merely by qualitative statements. In the latter case, quantitative modelling may stop at mid-point. A given type of emission may exert damaging effects on multiple damage categories, so that a corresponding number of impact pathways is required. Correspondingly, a given damage category may be affected jointly by various types of emissions or extractions. It is therefore an important task of the Life Cycle Initiative to carefully select damage indicators. The content of the midpoint and of the damage categories is clearly defined, and proposals are made on how to express the extent of environmental damage by suitable indicator quantities.
The present framework will offer the practitioner the choice to use either midpoint or damage indicators, depending on modelling uncertainty and increase in results interpretability. Due to the collaboration of acknowledged specialists in environmental processes and LCIA around the globe, it is expected that - after a few years of effort - the task forces of the Life Cycle Initiative will provide consistent and operational sets of methods and factors for LCIA in the future.
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Although both cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) have developed from engineering practice, and have the same objective of a holistic ex-ante assessment of human activities, the techniques have until recently developed in relative isolation. This has resulted in a situation where much can be gained from an integration of the strong aspects of each technique. Such integration is now being prompted by the more widespread use of both CBA and LCA on the global arena, where also the issues of social responsibility are now in focus. Increasing availability of data on both biophysical and social impacts now allow the development of a truly holistic, quantitative environmental assessment technique that integrates economic, biophysical and social impact pathways in a structured and consistent way. The concept of impact pathways, linking biophysical and economic inventory results via midpoint impact indicators to final damage indicators, is well described in the LCA and CBA literature. Therefore, this paper places specific emphasis on how social aspects can be integrated in LCA.
With a starting point in the conceptual structure and approach of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), as developed by Helias Udo de Haes and the SETAC/UNEP Life Cycle Initiative, the paper identifies six damage categories under the general heading of human life and well-being. The paper proposes a comprehensive set of indicators, with units of measurement, and a first estimate of global normalisation values, based on incidence or prevalence data from statistical sources and severity scores from health state analogues. Examples are provided of impact chains linking social inventory indicators to impacts on both human well-being and productivity.
It is suggested that human well-being measured in QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) may provide an attractive single-score alternative to direct monetarisation.
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Recent developments in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) provide a basis for reducing the uncertainty in monetarisation of environmental impacts. The LCIA method “Ecoindicator99” provides impact pathways ending in a physical score for each of the three safeguard subjects humans, ecosystems, and resources. We redefine these damage categories so that they can be measured in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) for impacts on human well-being, Biodiversity Adjusted Hectare Years (BAHYs) for impacts on ecosystems, and monetary units for impacts on resource productivity.
The monetary value of a QALY can be derived from the budget constraint, i.e. the fact that the average annual income is the maximum that an average person can pay for an additional life year. Since a QALY by definition is a life-year lived at full well-being, the budget constraint can be determined as the potential annual economic production per capita at full well-being. We determine this to be 74,000 EUR with an uncertainty estimate of 62,000 to 84,000 EUR. This corresponds well to the 74,627 EUR willingness-to-pay estimate of the ExternE project. Differences to other estimates can be explained by inherent biases in the valuation approaches used to derive these estimates.
The value of ecosystems can be expressed in monetary terms or in terms of QALYs, as the share of our well-being that we are willing to sacrifice to protect the ecosystems. While this trade-off should preferably be done by choice modelling, only one such study was found at the level of abstraction that allows us to relate BAHYs to QALYs or monetary units. Stressing the necessity for such studies, we resort to suggest a temporary proxy value of 1400 EUR/BAHY (or 52 BAHY/QALY), with an uncertainty range of 350 to 3500 EUR/BAHY.
The practical consequences of the above-described monetarisation values has been investigated by combining them with the midpoint impact categories of two recent LCIA methods, thus providing a new LCIA method with the option of expressing results in both midpoints and an optional choice between QALY and monetary units as endpoint. From our application of the new method to different case studies, it is noteworthy that resource impacts obtain less emphasis than in previous LCIA methods, while impacts on ecosystems obtain more importance. This shows the significance of being able to express impacts on resources and ecosystems in the same units as impacts on human well-being.
