Regionalized LCI Modeling: A Framework for the Integration of Spatial Data in Life Cycle Assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the most prominent technique for the assessment of environmental impacts of products, typically operates on the basis of average meteorological and ecological conditions of whole countries or large regions. This limits the representativeness and accuracy of LCA, particularly in the field of agriculture. The production processes associated with agricultural commodities are characterized by high spatial sensitivity as both inputs (e.g. mineral and organic fertilizers) and the accompanying release of emissions into soil, air and water (e.g. nitrate, dinitrogen monoxide, or phosphate emissions) are largely determined by micro-spatial environmental parameters (precipitation, soil properties, slope, etc.) and therefore highly context dependent. This spatial variability is vastly ignored under the “unit world” assumption inherent to LCA. In this paper, we present a new calculation framework for regionalized life cycle inventory modeling that aims to overcome this inherent limitation. The framework allows an automated, site-specific generation and assessment of regionalized unit process datasets. We demonstrate the framework in a case study on rapeseed cultivation in Germany. The results from the research are (i) a framework for generating regionalized data structures, and (ii) a first examination of the significance of further use cases.