Assessing Temporary Carbon Storage in Life Cycle Assessment and ...

1 Introduction
Land and wood-based products, among others, represent temporary carbon sinks. Since the embodied
carbon is retained outside the atmosphere for a period of time, some radiative forcing is postponed.
Carbon removal from the atmosphere and storage in the biosphere or anthroposphere, therefore, may
have the potential to help mitigate climate change.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprinting (CF) are increasingly popular tools for the
environmental assessment of products that take into account their entire life cycle; from the extraction
of raw materials through to their end-of-life. A robust method is therefore required to account for the
benefits, if any, of temporary carbon storage for use in these environmental assessment approaches.
Despite significant efforts, there is still no consensus on how to best consider this.
This workshop brought together experts on climate change, carbon footprinting and life cycle
assessment to review available options and to discuss the most appropriate method for accounting for
the potential benefits of temporary carbon storage. The workshop continued the work developed under
the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) [1], which provides methodological
recommendations for use in business and policy for assessing the environmental impacts of goods and
services, taking into account their full life cycle.
This report is a summary of the presentations and discussions held during this workshop. Sections 1 to
4 sum up the principal topics of the four sessions of presentations given by experts, including
discussions. Section 5 gives the final conclusions and recommendations coming from these
discussions. Finally, the abstracts provided by the different speakers are found in the Appendix (see
Section 7).
1.1 Background
There is increasing interest in accounting for temporary carbon storage in the LCA and CF of products.
Current LCA methodology does not consider giving any benefits to temporarily keeping carbon out of
the atmosphere. Indeed, since the timing of emissions is not considered, the amount of carbon
sequestered in biomass (negative emission) is simply added to the amount of carbon released at the
product end-of-life (positive emission), which results in carbon neutrality. No additional credits are
given for the time of storage.
Some recently published standards and methods, such as the British PAS 2050 [2] and the European
Commission’s ILCD Handbook [1], propose a way to account for the timing of GHG emissions in
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