Discounting and the Environment Lca Methodology with Case Study 8 Lca Methodology with Case Study Should Current Impacts Be Weighted Differently than Impacts Harming Future Generations?

income. Uncertainties could justify both positive and negative discount rates. Since the relationship between uncertainties and the magnitude of damage is generally not exponential, we recommend to model changes in the magnitude of damage in scenario analysis instead of considering it in discounting (which requires an exponential function of time in the case of a constant discount rate). We investigated the influence of discounting in a case study of heavy metal emissions from slag landfills. It could be shown that even small discount rates of less than 1% lead to a significant reduction of the impact score, whereas negative discount rates inflate the results. Conclusions and Recommendations. Discounting is only applicable when temporally differentiated data is available. In some cases, such a temporal differentiation is necessary to take sound decisions, especially when long emission periods are involved. An example is the disposal of nuclear or heavy metal-containing waste. In these cases, the results might completely depend on the discount rate. This paper helps to structure arguments and thus to support the decision about whether or not discounting should be applied in an LCA. Abstract Background. In Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), decision makers are often faced with tradeoffs between current and future impacts. One typical example is waste incineration, where immediate emissions to the air from the incineration process have to be weighted against future emissions of slag landfills. Long-term impacts are either completely taken into account or they are entirely disregarded in case of a temporal cutoff. Temporal cutoffs are a special case of discounting. Objective. In this paper, discounting is defined as valuing damages differently at different points of time using a positive or negative discount rate. Apart from temporal cutoffs , discounting has rarely been applied in LCA so far. It is the goal of this paper to discuss the concept of discounting and its applicability in the context of LCA.

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