Integrating Ecosystem Services and Life Cycle Impacts to Assess Sustainability : A Framework Accounting for Local and Global (Socio-)Environmental Impacts

Quantifying the sustainability impacts of human activities and product systems requires a variety of tools, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) or Ecosystem Services Assessment (ESA). Recently, the integration of both methods is being increasingly explored but existing frameworks often have their limitations, e.g. they are purely conceptual and are never tested or applied, they integrate only a few types of ecosystem services (ES) and are thus not comprehensive in their assessment, they only look at how processes negatively affect the supply of ES and not at beneficial impacts, or there is no quantification of the impact of value chain background processes on ES.In this paper, a ready-to-apply sustainability impact assessment framework is presented to assess (socio-)environmental impacts of human activities and related products by integrating LCA and ESA, relying on a newly defined set of Areas of Protection (AoP): human health and well-being, ecosystem quality and natural resources. The framework combines two integration approaches. The first approach relies on the availability of ESA results related to processes of the value chain under study, which are aggregated to the AoPs by applying monetary valuation techniques. However, as there might be insufficient data available on site-specific ES, another approach was explored in which new midpoint impact categories are created to account for changes in provisioning, regulating and cultural ES due to land use. Therefore, site-generic (but land-use and ES specific) characterisation factors, expressed in monetary units, were developed based on the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database. Furthermore, to be able to account for benefits and burdens, the framework includes the handprint and footprint concept. A simplified terrestrial case study on Scots Pine wood shows the applicability of the proposed framework, resulting in a handprint which is four times larger than the footprint for 1 kg of wood produced