An integrated framework to assess impacts on ecosystem services in LCA demonstrated by a case study of mining in Chile

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to quantitatively assess the environmental impacts associated to a product’s life cycle. Since its conception, LCA has improved considerably in sophistication and scope. Yet efforts to incorporate ecosystem services (ES) are still at an early stage. We present a novel framework for assessing ES in LCA that integrates models from adjacent fields and partitions the required modeling steps into different phases of LCA. Physical models are first used to determine how physical units of ecosystems are transformed by industrial processes; ES models are then used to determine the losses or gains of ES per ecosystem unit, and economic valuation is used to normalize and weigh the total ES losses/gains. We demonstrate the framework for a case study on water extraction by the mining industry in Chile and compare ES losses that result from the transformation of wetland and coastal ecosystems respectively. The proposed framework advances current efforts to assess ES beyond land use impacts in LCA by presenting a coherent approach to deal with spatial and temporal variability of ES production and by incorporating socioeconomic aspects of ES use. It also facilitates the coupling of LCA with other ES databases currently being developed