Regionalized LCA in practice: the need for a universal shapefile to match LCI and LCIA
Stephan Pfister, Christopher Oberschelp, Thomas Sonderegger
Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental footprints studies have become prominent tools to assess environmental impacts of products, services, companies, and regions, including the impacts over global supply chains. Many impact categories require regional differentiation for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), but also require regionally explicit life cycle inventory (LCI) data for emissions, water consumption, and land use. There have been many methodological developments to assess such impacts at a regional scale, such as for water scarcity on a watershed-level or land use impacts on an ecoregion-level Furthermore, a broad range of regional life cycle inventory (LCI) data has been provided, e.g., for land, water, and air emissions (e.