Status of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Africa

Selim Karkour,Chia-Chun Lin,Norihiro Itsubo,Mariem Maaoui,Safa Rachid

doi:10.3390/environments8020010

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has received attention as a tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of products and services. In the last 20 years, research on the topic has increased, and now more than 25,000 articles are related to LCA in scientific journals databases such as the Scopus database; however, the concept is relatively new in Africa, where the number of networks has been highlighted to be very low when compared to the other regions. This paper focuses on a review of life cycle assessments conducted in Africa over the last 20 years. It aims at highlighting the current research gap for African LCA. A total of 199 papers were found for the whole continent; this number is lower than that for both Japan and Germany (more than 400 articles each) and nearly equal to developing countries such as Thailand. Agriculture is the sector which received the most attention, representing 53 articles, followed by electricity and energy (60 articles for the two sectors). South Africa (43), Egypt (23), and Tunisia (19) were the countries where most of the research was conducted. Even if the number of articles related to LCA have increased in recent years, many steps still remain. For example, establishing a specific life cycle inventory (LCI) database for African countries or a targeted ideal life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method. Several African key sectors could also be assessed further.

Highlights

According to United Nations (UN) projections, the African population, which is composed of more than 1.2 billion people at present, is expected to double by 2050 [1]
As the focus was on environmental impacts, research based on other types of life cycle assessments such as life cycle costing (LCC) or social life cycle assessment (SCLA) were excluded
As the results found in the research articles were mainly based on life cycle inventory databases based on situations in developed countries (e.g., Ecoinent v2 [9]) or European life cycle assessment methods (e.g., CML-IA [18]), similar to previous reviews, we chose to not directly compare data from one region with data from another (i.e., Asia, Europe, or America)

Summary

Introduction

According to United Nations (UN) projections, the African population, which is composed of more than 1.2 billion people at present, is expected to double by 2050 [1]. By this time, Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt might enter the list of the top 30 global economies by 2050 [2]. LCA is a useful technique to assess the environmental impacts of a product or service throughout its entire life cycle, i.e., from the extraction of raw material through to processing, transport, use, and recycling/disposal [8]. By considering several different impacts over the entire life cycle, it is possible to identify potential tradeoffs from transitioning one stage

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion