Land Use in LCA: A New Subject Area and Call for Papers

Abstract

Land use by humans is the primary direct cause of many impacts from production systems. There is wide consensus that land use is the main cause of biodiversity degradation, and inappropriate land management is a main driver for the reduction in the biological production capacity of soil. Emissions caused by land use changes in the last two centuries have caused a change in the Earth's radiative forcing of the same order of magnitude as emissions from burning fossil fuels. It is thus not surprising that ways to account for land use impacts in LCA have been explored since the early methodological guides for this tool. However, there is to date no consensus as to how land use impacts may be incorporated in LCA. As noted in the synthesis of a recent workshop on land use impacts in LCA [1], "accounting for land use in LCA is inherently problematic [because] land represents a scarce resource, yet it is not simply consumed like mineral or fossil energy reserves, in the sense that it is not extracted and dissipated". Accounting for the use of the flow 'land' by adding up the m2year used in different stages of the life cycle is a good first step, but not enough. It is indeed the change in land quality that needs to be assessed, and this change obviously depends on how land is managed.