Spatial Differentiation in Life Cycle Impact Assessment: A decade of method development to increase the environmental realism of LCIA

Abstract

Potting and Blok (1995) at the 4th SETAC-Europe congress in Brussels in 1994. This presentation clearly illustrated the consequences of neglecting spatial differentiation, and by doing so presaged a feasible way to implement spatially differentiated characterisation in LCA. While knowledge of environmental models gradually made spatially differentiated characterisation modelling more feasible and better, the understanding of its relevance grew in LCA circles (Potting and Hauschild 1997a,b). In 1999, Udo de Haes and co-workers on behalf of the Second SETAC working group on Life Cycle Impact Assessment, representing the major part of the LCIA research community in Europe thus wrote: "Spatial differentiation will increase the discriminating power of LCIA; the need to proceed in this alley will increase if the systems to be compared are more alike. Spatial differentiation may be performed because of differences in fate and exposure mechanisms, differences in sensitivity for effects, the difference between background levels determining the working point in the dose-effect curve..." and they continued: "In general, the scientific task groups will start with a non-differentiated generic approach, aiming at global factors for every impact category. One step further concerns the development of spatially differentiated factors, where relevant, i.e. where large variations of fate and exposure or of effect variables are observed". They also noted that "It is important that with spatial differentiation also the global characterisation factors will remain available, because the additional efforts on data acquisition in the inventory phase may not always be possible". (Udo de Haes et al. 1999).