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Type Book Chapter
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Regionalized LCI Modeling: Framework for the Integration of Spatial Data in Life Cycle Assessment
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Jürgen Reinhard
  • Rainer Zah
  • Lorenz Hilty
Editors
  • Volker Wohlgemuth
  • Frank Fuchs-Kittowski
  • Jochen Wittmann
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Booktitle Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics
Series Name Progress in IS
ISBN 978-3-319-44710-0
ISSN 2196-8705
Place of Publication Cham
Publisher Springer (Bücher)
Page Range 223 - 235
Date 2017
Abstract Text 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 microspatial 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 better understanding of the characteristics and application of spatial data in the context of LCI modeling, (ii) a framework for generating regionalized data structures, and (iii) a first examination of the characteristics and significance of further use cases.
Official URL http://www.springer.com/series/10440
Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/978-3-319-44711-7
Other Identification Number merlin-id:13648
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