ABSTRACT
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely used all around the world to assess the environmental impacts of products or services (see Chapter 10). Initially designed as a ‘product-oriented’ approach, recent proposals have been made to broaden its scope of analysis towards meso-level systems, including municipalities (Guinée et al. 2011). Additionally, Hellweg and Milà i Canals (2014) showed the expanding nature of LCA and the development of country LCA in order to guide decisions on national sustainable consumption and production policy setting. The main purpose of LCA is to identify pollution transfers, both in terms of environmental impacts (i.e. multicriteria analysis) and life cycle stages. Applying this LCA characteristic at territorial scale will allow a supply chain perspective to be added to spatial planning and will link micro-scale policies with policies at macro scale (which is essential to identify pollution transfers between territories). Broadening the LCA scope (from a product approach towards assessing all activities at territorial scale) allows an important need to be filled for quantitative environmental indicators to support policy-making at different scales, ranging from municipalities and regions to nations. However, the implementation of LCA in these territorial systems is not straightforward, as a territory, a municipality, or a region is a complex system, encompassing many production and consumption activities, which associates a group of stakeholders and the geographical space that these stakeholders use, develop, and manage (Moine 2006). Consequently, Loiseau et al. (2013) proposed to adapt the standardized LCA framework to assess such systems and developed a new typology of LCA, called ‘territorial LCA’. Territorial LCA aims at assessing all consumption and production activities that take place within a given territory in order to support decision-making, both in terms of territorial diagnosis and land planning scenario comparisons. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the main features of the territorial LCA approach and to focus on its operational side. Lastly, some development perspectives will be discussed.
