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Background, Aim and Scope:
Land use and changes in land use have a significant impact on biodiversity. Still, there is no agreed upon methodology for how this impact should be assessed and included in LCA. This paper presents a methodology for including land use impact on biodiversity in Life Cycle Impact Assessment and provides a case example from forestry in Norway.
Materials and Methods:
The methodology presented applies indirect assessments of biodiversity based on knowledge on what key factors are important for maintaining biodiversity in a boreal forest. These are used to construct an index on Conditions for Maintained Biodiversity. In addition the intrinsic quality of an area is assessed on the basis of the Ecosystem Scarcity and Ecosystem Vulnerability. Globally available data on ecoregions are here used. In addition the spatial and temporal impact is assessed based on the annual regrowth of the forest.
Results:
In the case study the ecoregions ‘Scandinavian and Russian taiga’ and ‘Scandinavian costal coniferous forests’ and different forestry regimes are compared. Based on the proposed methodology, the intrinsic quality of the Scandinavian costal coniferous forests is estimated to be approximately 40% higher than equivalent for the Scandinavian and Russian taiga. New and improved targets for the key factor ‘areas set aside’ can also reduce the impact on biodiversity from land use by approximately 20%.
Discussion:
The paper presents a new methodology for how land use impacts on biodiversity can be included in LCA. The methodology is based on a proposed framework and the results from the case study show that the methodology is capable to distinguish between different forestry regimes and forestry in different ecoregions. The data used are readily available, but more research is needed to scale the proposed key factors and also include new key factors. It is at present not possible to validate the size of the differences.
Conclusions:
The importance of land use impact on biodiversity is indisputable and this should be included in LCA. The proposed methodology is developed within a framework developed within the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative and provides a methodology demonstrated to be able to distinguish between both similar activities in different ecoregions and different management practices within one ecoregion.
Recommendations and
Perspectives:
More work is needed to establish a methodology for land use impact on biodiversity in LCIA and due to the importance this should be a prioritized task. The proposed application of indirect indicators to assess impact on biodiversity from land use changes in LCIA should be further explored, but the proposed methodology can already be applied with globally available data on ecoregions. The challenge is to develop sound key factors for the relevant ecosystems.
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