EIPOT Final Project Report - Stockholm Environment Institute

More documents

Recommendations

Info

ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eipot.eu) “Development of a methodology for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services” treated as a hypothetical industry sector that draws inputs from the existing sectors and has some associated environmental burden. Integrated hybrid analysis is the most sophisticated combination: The IO table (in monetary units) is fully interconnected with the matrix representation of the physical product (or process) system in physical units, thus forming one consistent computational structure. The interconnection is located at upstream and downstream cut-off points where process data are not available. Note that, computationally, integrated hybrid LCA is a functional generalisation of IOA and tiered hybrid LCA. Compared to process LCA, the main difference of the hybrid life cycle method is that it can overcome problems of additivity and truncation (system boundary) by using sectoral data from environmental IOA as an additional source of secondary data, where no primary or secondary process level data is available. Thus, data gaps in the LCA system can be filled with much less effort than would be required to obtain process data. The advantages of IO (ready available, complete and consistent data) are combined with those of process LCA (precise and process-specific data). Consider, for example, a hybrid LCA of a new car: The material composition is known and cost calculations are available. For the major materials (steel, plastics and glass) and the main assembly, process LCA data are available and used in the analysis. For some minor materials, assembly processes (such as for electric components), capital goods, trade storage and so on, LCA data are missing. Because the costs of these items are known, and the industrial sectors that deliver them are known, these data can be obtained from environmental IO databases (SRIO or MRIO). The following table, taken from Suh and Huppes (2005), lists the various approaches together with their main characteristics. Table 4.1: Criteria for choosing Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) methods (from Suh and Huppes 2005) 27
ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eipot.eu) “Development of a methodology for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services” Hybrid LCA can be used to estimate the embodied impacts of traded goods and services. While national SRIO hybrid LCA studies have been described in the literature, no trade specific analysis has yet been published. However, it is conceivable that process-based analyses of international supply chains could be combined with data from MRIO models. Such a method would especially be suited to complex commodities. From a statistical point of view, process LCA data play three roles: firstly, to provide "disaggregation factors" that allow representation of NAMEA data at a lower aggregation level than allowed by the confidentiality restrictions on the original NAMEA data, and at lower levels than possible from the way NAMEA data are collected. Secondly, process-specific emission factors can help to replace or qualify average emission intensities of IO sectors. And thirdly, Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) provides characterisation factors needed to express environmental pressures as impacts (see Section 4.5.1). Below we provide several examples of recent hybrid LCA studies 17 to demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of such approaches, even if they do not explicitly deal with traded goods and services. Benders et al. (2001) developed a tiered hybrid analysis tool for determining energy use and greenhouse gas emissions related to household consumption items focussing on reduction in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. This tool, the energy analysis program (EAP), is a computer program that consists of a number of fill-in screens corresponding to steps in a hybrid method (developed by van Engelenburg et al. 1994) in which some main steps are covered with LCA data and some minor steps with input-output data. One of the applications of the program concerns the calculation of the total energy requirement of Dutch households by combining household budget data with energy intensities of about 350 products and services (Biesiot and Moll 1995). The environmental assessment study of Swedish agriculture presented by Engström et al. (2007) is a classical example of tiered hybrid analysis where SRIO model data are extended or replaced with process LCA data. This is done for the purpose of specifying emission intensities (such as for N 2 O emissions from the production of nitrogen fertilizers which fall under the broad IO sector of 'chemical products) or for extending pressure variables to LCA impact categories such as global warming, acidification, eutrophication and so on. Similar tiered hybrid analyses have been run by Kofoworola and Gheewala (2008) for the life cycle assessment of an office building in Thailand or by Junnila (2008) for the life cycle management of energy-consuming products. In these cases LCA data describe site-specific processes that replace IO data or augment these by adding downstream life cycle impacts to the system. The quantification of impacts from international transportation is an important area for tiered hybrid analysis using process data. The main question is how to assign emissions from the combustion of fuels from bunkers for international aviation and shipping. From a production perspective (such as when following SNA93 principles; United Nations Statistics Division 1993), bunker emissions should be assigned to ship or plane operators’ country of domicile and – in the case of passenger transport – counted as exports if passengers are non-resident, otherwise as domestic consumption. From a consumption perspective (as taken by an EIPOT MRIO model), emissions of residents using international passenger transport should be counted as consumption emissions of their country. For goods, bunker emissions from imports are allocated to country of import and bunker emissions from exports are not counted. In any case a bottom-up approach using process data is needed, which requires the following information: 17 The selection is non-exhaustive. 28
Page 1 and 2: Development of a methodology for th
Page 3 and 4: ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eip
Page 27: ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eip
Page 79 and 80:
ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eip
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83:
show all

EIPOT Final Project Report - Stockholm Environment Institute

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?