Enhancing relevance by regional life cycle impact assessment at global level

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This research proposal aims at enhancing the environmental relevance and reducing the uncertainty of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) by addressing global regionalization. It tackles the inability of today's LCIA models to assess emission and resource consumption of product life cycles in a global economy. Focusing on two impact categories: human toxicity and water use, this research proposal will expand and further develop current characterization models to cover a global scale at an appropriate level of resolution. The enhanced modeling capability will be supported by the acquisition of sophisticated expert models and parameter databases with global coverage. Human toxicity characterization modeling will additionally be complemented with an indoor module to scale regionalization down to the working place and the household level. By addressing the important and timely issue related to the use of (resource) water, this proposal also significantly contributes to broaden the scope of LCIA by characterizing regional differences of current inventory assessment practices. Influential parameters in respect to their typical spatial variability range and typical uncertainty range linked to geographically- differentiated, archetypal and generic characterization factors will be extensively analyzed through probabilistic (Montecarlo) or analytical (Taylor expansion series) uncertainty approaches. Finally, this work will ensure that future LCAs performed in Canada and elsewhere will improve in quality and that the results obtained will lead to better and more insightful decision-making.