Using Accrual Accounting Life Cycle Assessment as an Indicator of Urban Sustainability

Over the past few decades, a growing number of qualitative and quantitative methods such as echo-labels and urban metabolism have been developed for environmental assessment of urban areas. Each of these methods has its advantages; however none of them provides a solid framework which integrates life cycle thinking with multi-criteria and site-specific environmental assessment of an urban area. Recently, a few Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) practitioners have attempted to apply this robust methodology to urban areas to rectify the shortcomings of existing methods. However methodological issues such as definition of life cycle and functional unit of cities as well as selection of appropriate system boundary hinder the application of LCA-based methods. This paper proposes using a well-known financial tool called accrual accounting along with life cycle impact assessment to provide a new framework for monitoring and evaluating environmental implications of urban areas. While keeping remarkable capabilities of LCA, the proposed method overcomes methodological problems and improves functionality of LCA-based assessment of urban environment.