proposal for accounting for biodiversity in life cycle assessment

• Published in: Biodiversity and conservation Vol. 19; no. 11; pp. 3245 - 3254
• Main Authors: Penman, Trent D, Law, Brad S, Ximenes, Fabiano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands 01.10.2010; Springer Netherlands; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Biodiversity metric; Biological diversity; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Conservation Biology/Ecology; Disturbance ecology; Ecology; Environmental assessment; Environmental impact; LCA; Life cycle analysis; Life Sciences; Original Paper; Product lifecycle management; Biodiversity metric; Disturbance ecology; LCA
• ISSN: 0960-3115; 1572-9710
• DOI: 10.1007/s10531-010-9889-7

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for assessing the environmental impacts associated with products throughout their lifecycle. Many impacts are accounted for within the LCA framework, but to date biodiversity impacts have received little attention. There are a number of existing direct and indirect measures of biodiversity within the ecological field, some of which have the potential to be developed into a useable method for LCA. However, our assessment is that considerable development would be required and their implementation for LCA is not likely in the foreseeable future. Here an alternative approach is proposed for rapidly incorporating biodiversity impacts into LCA. The approach relies on expert opinions through a series of questions which aim to encapsulate the main issues relating to biodiversity within a disturbance impact framework. While the technique is in its infancy we outline a foundation for the approach and identify the steps required to develop this method for implementation into LCA.