Background Review of existing weighting approaches in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)

This report presents the first part of the work carried out towards the development of a scheme for weighting indicators across the impact categories (climate change, acidification, resource depletion, human cancer effects, and others) that are commonly considered in life cycle assessment. Weighting is essential to derive a single indicator of the overall environmental impact of the EU-27 and to build the resources indicators as set out in the Thematic Strategy. This report further details the above classification scheme and analyses a number of relevant weighting approaches. Each of the methods considered has been characterized in terms of methodological foundations, geographical representativeness, procedure for values definition, communication impact and major applications in the LCA practice.