Life Cycle Impact Assessment - Task Force 4: Transboundary impacts

Aims

This task force aims at establishing recommended practice and guidance for use in transboundary categories, i.e: climate change, ozone depletion, aquatic and terrestrial eutrophication and acidification. Photo-oxidant formation and respiratory inorganics (primary and secondary particles) will be coordinated with Task Force 3. The task force will address midpoint categories and their relation to damage categories human health and biotic natural environment in a consistent way with Task Force 3.

Specific challenges for each impact category are defined in the LCIA definition study document.

Motivation

These categories are of high importance for the international promotion of Integrated Product Policy. A central point is the need for adapting knowledge from other scientific communities focusing on environmental modelling to the assessment of life cycle impacts linked to functions that products and services provide to fulfil human needs.

Work program and work process

Collaborative framework: For these categories, it is of high importance to rely on the expertise and timely contribution of various experts from different fields. Input from external experts was indeed a major problem in the previous SETAC task forces in this area, as most of the specific expertise is outside the LCA community and as experts in these fields therefore usually not attend SETAC-conferences. Therefore, as much as possible, meetings and workshops will be connected to meetings of experts in these impact categories.

It is the ambition of the task force to take contact with related scientific communities working on Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) and with experts of the scientific network under the UNECE convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP ) and similar efforts in other regions. The aim of this workshop will be to explore the interfaces between LC(I)A and Integrated models and to get external input for recommended practice on the impact categories covered by the transboundary impacts task force.

Another need is to enable compatibility between transboundary categories and other categories related to human health and biotic natural environment: The link to damage categories will be considered from the start in framing the field and defining functional components of the assessment, ensuring consistent approaches between midpoint categories.

According to this content, the work programme is foreseen, in two phases.It is aimed in the first year to frame the field and arrive to a set of recommended characterization factors at generic level for the midpoint categories. Further work will then be carried out to extend model and frame, possibly to site-dependency and latest models in development. Special attention should be paid to arrive at a regional balanced input, specifically also taking into account the perspective of developing regions.

The following activities are foreseen:
1) Preparation, possibly per impact category, of a state-of-the-art review, including the compatibility with other categories and the link to damages.
• Advice for a generic set of recommended characterization factors for the midpoint categories, with link to damages
2) Analysis of advanced recommended practice as input to further workshop
• Workshop about interfaces between Integrated Modelling and LCA, and about – site-dependent / generic – recommended practice on all impact categories;
• Proposal for new factors.