LCA Food 2012 in Saint Malo, France! - Manifestations et colloques ...

PARALLEL SESSION 2A: LAND USE 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
3.2. Case study
The converted characterisation factors CFs’ can be used to characterise land use inventory flows into an
integrated indicator representing ecosystem services loss in monetary unit ($) (Figure 3). Please note that this
assessment step assumes an equal weighting among the different midpoints. Results show that potential
impacts are specific to the types of ecosystem service, the location and the type of land cover. This latter
affects indeed the physical midpoint (e.g. intensive harvesting degrades more than regular harvesting) and
the type of ecosystem service damaged, while location affects them because of their spatial variability. While
the physical midpoint assesses the potential effects on ecosystem services, the converted midpoint goes a
step further, as it takes into account the local and actual need of the ecosystem services. For example, ecosystem
services related to water filtration prevales in Australia, because of both its local scarcity and relative
important need.
Figure 3. Graph of converted and aggregated land use CFs’ for different biopolymer production locations
(monetarisation normalisation, equal weighting) for an agricultural land cover.
4. Discussion
The presented framework consists to estimate the direct benefits (e.g. use value) provided by the ecosystem
services through compensation systems: what would be today’s ecosystem benefit lost by the use and
degradation of the land. It therefore relies on the assumption/virtual situation that the conservative approach
by local compensation is always possible and implemented. This estimated value does not capture more
elaborate alternatives such as importation, substitution (of biotic products for example), migration (abandon
of the ecosystem).
As for using compensation of ecosystem services, it should be highlighted that only the cost of technological
systems is assessed by this methodology, this is not consequential life cycle (impact) assessment to
the extent that potential impact related to the compensation systems assessed are not taken into account. The
new area of protection represents indeed the ecosystem services loss, which can also be interpreted as a
(natural) cost to society. Consequential LCA still depends on the study goal and scope. It remains the choice
of the practitioner to include or not the complete inventory of the compensation systems, so that all the different
impacts on all the categories are assessed.
The developed methodology uses international coherent databases, also recognized to be regularly updated.
This lets some place to evolution and adjustment, as economic valuation of ecosystems is still in its
early developments and that cost values change with time. An example is the social cost of carbon, which
value highly depends on the chosen temporal perspective, itself related to the different perspectives defined
in LCA (Hofstetter, 1998). Moreover, this methodology can potentially be applied to future (if developed)
midpoints inside, but also outside the land use impact category.
5. Conclusion
The development of the conversion factors allows to express all the midpoints proposed by the LULCIA
approach to economic values, bringing a whole new level of interpretation as natural ecosystem services loss.
Their economic valuation may potentially allow future LCAs to assess other impacts related to land use, such
as aesthetics and recreational aspects (not assessed so far, even outside the LCA).
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