Life cycle assessment in the context of decarbonization and carbon neutrality
Vanessa Bach
Abstract
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes the need to immediately tackle climate change by significantly reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and capping global warming at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2022 ). In the Paris Agreement, most countries committed themselves to achieve GHG neutrality by 2050 to tackle the global impacts of climate change (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2022 ). These commitments are not only being addressed on a country level, but also broken down to industrial sectors and companies and their products, leading to an increase in carbon neutrality labels and claims. To achieve carbon neutrality, most scientists advocate for the “mitigation-over-compensation” hierarchy, which prioritizes mitigation through the avoidance and reduction of GHG emissions and the replacement of carbon-intensive activities, but also recognizes the necessity of offsetting to compensate for emissions that cannot be mitigated.