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

PARALLEL SESSION 6B: FISHIERIES, SOIL, AND EMERGY METHODS 8 th Int. Conference on LCA in the
Agri-Food Sector, 1-4 Oct 2012
Attributional or consequential LCA perspective. All, but one of the assessed studies have adopted a
descriptive, and therefore, current state-of-the-art approach, using the attributional perspective. The
use of consequential assessment by Thrane (2004) was aimed to detect the environmental changes
linked to certain predicted decisions. While the minimal use of consequential LCA in fishing systems
may be linked to the lack of data availability regarding marginal production systems, its use combined
with stock prediction techniques may constitute an important milestone in policy making.
Functional unit and system boundaries. The selection of the functional unit (FU) shows great differences
between studies, suggesting that the nature of the project is the main factor that influences the
reference unit. Nevertheless, two different tendencies were observed. On the one hand, those studies
that limited their system boundaries to the fishing stage used FUs that refer to bulk landings at port
(Hospido and Tyedmers, 2005) or intermediate supply chain packaging units (Ziegler et al., 2011).
On the other hand, studies that focused on the entire supply chain presented highly specific FUs,
linked to final package presentations (Zufía and Arana, 2008) or to standard consumption portions
(Vázquez-Rowe et al., 2011).
Allocation procedure. Allocation constitutes a key feature in fisheries LCA, affecting mainly the
fishing stage due to the multispecies characteristics of many fisheries. Furthermore, debate around
allocation has gradually increased given its strong influence on final results (Pelletier and Tyedmers,
2011). Despite the extended use of either mass or economic allocation in the majority of evaluated
studies, recent studies show increasingly critical visions regarding these two options. For instance,
several studies have shown their disagreement with the fact that using an economic allocation creates
a situation in which low value species show reduced environmental burdens with respect to other
species in a unique biophysical system (Pelletier and Tyedmers, 2011). As a result, some recent studies
propose new allocation perspectives, such as energy content (Svanes et al., 2011b). Nevertheless,
the use of multiple allocation approaches in different studies may lead to atomisation; therefore, the
need for well-discussed allocation explanations is needed to guarantee reproducibility and transparency
(Ayer et al., 2007).
Assessment methods and impact categories selection. The greater proportion of evaluated case studies
used the CML Baseline 2000 assessment method (Frischknecht et al., 2007), constituting a midpoint
approach to the results. Concerning the selection of impact categories, an increase in the number
of utilised categories has been identified, including ozone layer depletion or toxicity categories
and newly developed fishery-specific categories (non-standardized).
Result interpretation. The majority of the publications evaluated limit the result reporting to the inventory
data and the characterisation phase (Sund, 2009; Vázquez-Rowe et al., 2012a; Ziegler et al.,
2011). Regarding sensitivity analysis, its use has not been an extended practice in most publications.
4.2. Methodological advances
A selection of outstanding methodological innovations in the field of fisheries LCA is listed below:
New impact categories. Innovations regarding the introduction of novel fishery-specific impact categories
have been limited. More specifically, three different biological issues linked to fisheries have
been developed. In the first place, the computation of seafloor damage was incorporated by Ziegler
et al., (2003) and has gained acceptance ever since. Secondly, the calculation of net primary productivity
in LCA studies was introduced in aquaculture studies. However, recent studies have introduced
the so called biotic resource use (BRU) indicator (Fulton, 2010; Parker, 2011). Finally, discards,
which were initially included in terms of total mass discarded per FU have recently been computed
in a global discard index – GDI (Vázquez-Rowe et al., 2012b).
LCA+DEA. The joint use of LCA with data envelopment analysis (DEA), as proposed by Vázquez-
Rowe et al., (2010a) aims at reducing the effect of increased standard deviations, as well as providing
additional information for result interpretation. Moreover, the main innovative issue linked to the
LCA+DEA method is the inclusion of an operational dimension in environmental management. In
fact, LCA+DEA was computed for a set of different fishing fleets to quantify the environmental burdens
concerning operational inefficiency in order to define target performance values for inefficient
vessels.
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