Llorenç Milà i Canals

Emerging approaches, challenges and opportunities in life cycle assessment

In the modern economy, international value chains—production, use, and disposal of goods—have global environmental impacts. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aims to track these impacts and assess them from a systems perspective, identifying strategies for improvement without burden shifting. We review recent developments in LCA, including existing and emerging applications aimed at supporting environmentally informed decisions in policy-making, product development and procurement, and consumer choices. LCA constitutes a viable screening tool that can pinpoint environmental hotspots in complex value chains, but we also caution that completeness in scope comes at the price of simplifications and uncertainties. Future advances of LCA in enhancing regional detail and accuracy as well as broadening the assessment to economic and social aspects will make it more relevant for producers and consumers alike.

Spatial patterns of agricultural expansion determine impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage

Significance Deforestation is a major threat to biodiversity and many ecosystem services and is closely linked to agricultural expansion. Sustainability assessment of different agricultural products and policies requires an understanding of the impacts of land conversion resulting from shifts in demand or incentives for production. The prevailing approaches to estimating such impacts do not account for the spatial context of the transformation. This study shows how different patterns of agricultural expansion into forested landscapes can vastly reduce or exacerbate the total impact, suggesting that methods to measure sustainability should consider not only the total area but also where and how the landscape is converted. The agricultural expansion and intensification required to meet growing food and agri-based product demand present important challenges to future levels and management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Influential actors such as corporations, governments, and multilateral organizations have made commitments to meeting future agricultural demand sustainably and preserving critical ecosystems. Current approaches to predicting the impacts of agricultural expansion involve calculation of total land conversion and assessment of the impacts on biodiversity or ecosystem services on a per-area basis, generally assuming a linear relationship between impact and land area. However, the impacts of continuing land development are often not linear and can vary considerably with spatial configuration. We demonstrate what could be gained by spatially explicit analysis of agricultural expansion at a large scale compared with the simple measure of total area converted, with a focus on the impacts on biodiversity and carbon storage. Using simple modeling approaches for two regions of Brazil, we find that for the same amount of land conversion, the declines in biodiversity and carbon storage can vary two- to fourfold depending on the spatial pattern of conversion. Impacts increase most rapidly in the earliest stages of agricultural expansion and are more pronounced in scenarios where conversion occurs in forest interiors compared with expansion into forests from their edges. This study reveals the importance of spatially explicit information in the assessment of land-use change impacts and for future land management and conservation.

Building Organizational Capability for Life Cycle Management

Corporations are being pressured to integrate life cycle thinking and practices across global supply chains. The UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative has been developing a life cycle management capability maturity model (LCM CMM) to help mainstream life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle management (LCM). Pilot projects in small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to apply the model showed the companies were able to identify and implement projects that delivered both near-term business value and developed the organizational capability for LCM. A key benefit of the life cycle approach was enhanced cross-functional integration and collaboration with suppliers and customers. The projects did identify a need for more guidance on how to interpret the business impact of environmental concerns and to align LCM efforts with company business strategy. Collaborative networks where more advanced companies can share their knowledge are a key enabler, particularly in developing economies.

Footprinting Farms, a comparison of three GHG calculators

Agriculture and forestry (including land use changes) contribute approximately 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally, but have a significant mitigation potential. Several activities to reduce GHGs at a landscape scale are under development (e.g. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation activities or Clean Development Mechanism projects) but these will not be effective without improvements at the basic management scale: the farm. A number of farm-level GHG calculators have been developed; to increase farmers awareness of the GHG impacts of their management practices; to aid decision-support for mitigation actions; and to enable farmers to calculate and communicate their GHG emissions, whether for their own records, as a prerequisite to supply chain certification, or as part of larger scale mechanisms. This paper compares three farm-level GHG calculators with significant potential influence. It demonstrates how the tools differ in output when using the same input data and highlights in detail what lies behind these differences. It then discusses more generally some potential implications of using different calculators and the important considerations that must be made, thus helping future tool users or developers to interpret results and better achieve consistent and comparable results.