Review of life-cycle based methods for absolute environmental sustainability assessment and their applications
Review article, 2020
In many regions and at the planetary scale, human pressures on the environment exceed levels that natural systems can sustain. These pressures are caused by networks of human activities, which often extend across countries and continents due to global trade. This has led to an increasing requirement for methods that enable absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) of anthropogenic systems and which have a basis in life cycle assessment (LCA). Such methods enable the comparison of environmental impacts of products, companies, nations, etc, with an assigned share of environmental carrying capacity for various impact categories. This study is the first systematic review of LCA-based AESA methods and their applications. After developing a framework for LCA-based AESA methods, we identified 45 relevant studies through an initial survey, database searches and citation analysis. We characterized these studies according to their intended application, impact categories, basis of carrying capacity estimates, spatial differentiation of environmental model and principles for assigning carrying capacity. We then characterized all method applications and synthesized their results. Based on this assessment, we present recommendations to practitioners on the selection and use of existing LCA-based AESA methods, as well as ways to perform assessments and communicate results to decision-makers. Furthermore, we identify future research priorities intended to extend coverage of all components of the proposed method framework, improve modeling and increase the applicability of methods.
life cycle assessment
planetary boundaries
carrying capacity
case study review
absolute environmental sustainability
sharing principle
safe operating space
Author
Anders Bjorn
École Polytechnique de Montréal
Concordia University
Chanjief Chandrakumar
Massey University
Anne-Marie Boulay
École Polytechnique de Montréal
Gabor Doka
Doka Life Cycle Assessments
Kai Fang
Zhejiang University
Natacha Gondran
Université de Lyon
Michael Zwicky Hauschild
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Annemarie Kerkhof
Navigant
Henry King
Unilever
Manuele Margni
École Polytechnique de Montréal
Sarah McLaren
Massey University
Carina Mueller
University of York
Mikolaj Owsianiak
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Gregory Peters
Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Environmental Systems Analysis
Sandra Roos
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden
Serenella Sala
European Commission (EC)
Gustav Sandin
IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute
Sarah Sim
Unilever
Marcial Vargas-Gonzalez
Quantis
Morten Ryberg
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Environmental Research Letters
17489318 (ISSN) 17489326 (eISSN)
Vol. 15 8 083001Subject Categories
Other Environmental Engineering
Environmental Management
Environmental Analysis and Construction Information Technology
DOI
10.1088/1748-9326/ab89d7