William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
Environ Sci Technol. 2010 Apr 1;44(7):2624-31. doi: 10.1021/es900548a.
Despite the essential role of ecosystem goods and services in sustaining all human activities, they are often ignored in engineering decision making, even in methods that are meant to encourage sustainability. For example, conventional Life Cycle Assessment focuses on the impact of emissions and consumption of some resources. While aggregation and interpretation methods are quite advanced for emissions, similar methods for resources have been lagging, and most ignore the role of nature. Such oversight may even result in perverse decisions that encourage reliance on deteriorating ecosystem services. This article presents a step toward including the direct and indirect role of ecosystems in LCA, and a hierarchical scheme to interpret their contribution. The resulting Ecologically Based LCA (Eco-LCA) includes a large number of provisioning, regulating, and supporting ecosystem services as inputs to a life cycle model at the process or economy scale. These resources are represented in diverse physical units and may be compared via their mass, fuel value, industrial cumulative exergy consumption, or ecological cumulative exergy consumption or by normalization with total consumption of each resource or their availability. Such results at a fine scale provide insight about relative resource use and the risk and vulnerability to the loss of specific resources. Aggregate indicators are also defined to obtain indices such as renewability, efficiency, and return on investment. An Eco-LCA model of the 1997 economy is developed and made available via the web (www.resilience.osu.edu/ecolca). An illustrative example comparing paper and plastic cups provides insight into the features of the proposed approach. The need for further work in bridging the gap between knowledge about ecosystem services and their direct and indirect role in supporting human activities is discussed as an important area for future work.
尽管生态系统商品和服务对于维持所有人类活动至关重要，但在工程决策中，它们经常被忽视，即使在旨在鼓励可持续性的方法中也是如此。例如，传统的生命周期评估侧重于排放和一些资源消耗的影响。虽然排放的综合和解释方法相当先进，但对于资源的类似方法却滞后了，而且大多数方法都忽略了自然的作用。这种忽视甚至可能导致产生鼓励依赖不断恶化的生态系统服务的错误决策。本文提出了在生命周期评估中纳入生态系统的直接和间接作用的步骤，并提出了一种解释其贡献的层次方案。由此产生的基于生态的生命周期评估（Eco-LCA）将大量的供应、调节和支持生态系统服务作为过程或经济规模的生命周期模型的投入。这些资源以不同的物理单位表示，可以通过它们的质量、燃料价值、工业累积潜能消耗或生态累积潜能消耗进行比较，也可以通过与每种资源的总消耗或可用性进行归一化来进行比较。这样在细粒度上的结果提供了关于相对资源利用以及特定资源损失的风险和脆弱性的洞察力。还定义了综合指标以获得可再生性、效率和投资回报等指数。开发了一个 1997 年经济的 Eco-LCA 模型，并通过网络（www.resilience.osu.edu/ecolca）提供。一个比较纸杯和塑料杯的实例说明了所提出方法的特点。讨论了在弥合关于生态系统服务的知识与其在支持人类活动方面的直接和间接作用之间的差距方面进一步工作的必要性，这是未来工作的一个重要领域。
