Global land use impact assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services in LCA

Landuseandlandusechangehavesevereeffectsonbiodiver-sityandthecapacityofecosystemstodeliverservices,suchasbiomass production or water filtration. Whereas research onimpacts of land use on biodiversity is a well-established field,research on ecosystem services motivated by Daily (1997)isless developed, but steadily catching up. The MillenniumEcosystem Assessment (2005) on ecosystem changes hasbegun to address this gap and has highlighted the impor-tance of nature’s services for human well-being. Meanwhile,operational assessment methods support decision-makers inplanning and optimizing landscapes with respect to biodi-versity and multiple ecosystem services (Chan et al. 2006;Daily et al. 2009; Groot et al. 2010;Maesetal.2012).However, until now, those methodologies have mainlyfocused on regional systems with distinct spatial boundaries.However, the ecological assessment of land use in productsystems requires a global approach.The basic motivation for this special issue is to integratelanduseimpactsonbiodiversityandecosystemservices intolife cycleassessment (LCA), toallowamore comprehensiveimpact assessment of globally distributed product systems.The work builds on the key elements for land use impactassessment within LCA that was developed in the phase 1 ofthe UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative (Mila i Canals et al.2007). The methodology presented here is the outcome oftheprojectLULCIAwithinthephase2oftheUNEP-SETACLife Cycle Initiative. The main contributors to the projecthave been PES, University of Bayreuth, Germany (ThomasKoellner), SEAC, Unilever, UK (Llorenc Mila i Canals),European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Italy(Miguel Brandao and Danielle Maia de Souza), NSSI, ETHZurich, Switzerland (Laura de Baan), IWOE, University ofSt. Gallen, Switzerland (Ruedi Muller-Wenk), CIRAIG,Canada (Manuele Margni and Rosie Saad), LBP-GaBi,University of Stuttgart, Germany (Ulrike Bos, Tabea Beck,Jan-Paul Lindner and Bastian Wittstock), and CLIOPE,Facultad Regional Mendoza, Universidad TecnologicaNacional, Argentina (Barbara Civit). After a long processof consensus building on framing the methodology, weachieved an operational LCIA method to assess the use ofland anywhere on the globe (Koellner et al. 2013b)anddevelopedasetofcharacterizationfactorsthatallowslinkingspatially explicit land use elementary flows of occupationand transformation (Koellner et al. 2013a) to impacts onbiodiversity (de Baan et al. 2013; Souza et al. 2013) andservices provided by terrestrial ecosystems (Muller-Wenkand Brandao 2010; Beck et al. 2010; Brandao and Mila iCanals 2013; Saad et al. 2013). These characterization fac-tors were tested in a food case study (Mila i Canals et al.2013). With this special issue, certainly not all problemsrelated to the assessment of land use impacts on biodiversityandecosystemservicesonaglobalscalecouldbesolved.Wesee the following five major outstanding questions relevantfor future research to improve the assessment of biodiversityand ecosystem services in LCA:How to combine generic impact assessment with site-specificassessments? Although uncertainties of the current modelsare large they allow for the identification of potential prob-lem areas related to land use impacts in the backgroundsystem of a product and minimize the risk of problemshifting. However, such a generic assessment on a globalscale cannot replace on-site assessment of ecosystems.Therefore, site-specific characterization factors for the