Sensitivity analysis in life cycle assessment

Life cycle assessments require many input parameters and many of these parameters are uncertain; therefore, a sensitivity analysis is an essential part of the final interpretation. The aim of this study is to compare seven sensitivity methods applied to three types of case stud-ies. Two (hypothetical) case studies describing electricity production: one shows linear and another shows non-linear behavior. The third case study describes a large (existing) case study of seafood production containing high input uncertainties. The methods are compared based on their results, i.e. variance decomposition and ranking of the input parameters. Results show that Sobol’ sensitivity indices per-form the best for all three case studies. The Sobol’ method can be a useful method in case of non-linear LCA models or LCA models that include outliers.