Natural Capital Project, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Unilever Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre, Unilever R&D, Colworth Science Park, Sharnbrook, Bedfordshire MK44 1LQ, UK.
Nat Commun. 2017 Apr 21;8:15065. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15065.
International corporations in an increasingly globalized economy exert a major influence on the planet's land use and resources through their product design and material sourcing decisions. Many companies use life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate their sustainability, yet commonly-used LCA methodologies lack the spatial resolution and predictive ecological information to reveal key impacts on climate, water and biodiversity. We present advances for LCA that integrate spatially explicit modelling of land change and ecosystem services in a Land-Use Change Improved (LUCI)-LCA. Comparing increased demand for bioplastics derived from two alternative feedstock-location scenarios for maize and sugarcane, we find that the LUCI-LCA approach yields results opposite to those of standard LCA for greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption, and of different magnitudes for soil erosion and biodiversity. This approach highlights the importance of including information about where and how land-use change and related impacts will occur in supply chain and innovation decisions.
在日益全球化的经济中，国际企业通过产品设计和材料采购决策，对地球的土地利用和资源产生重大影响。许多公司使用生命周期评估 (LCA) 来评估其可持续性，但常用的 LCA 方法缺乏空间分辨率和预测生态信息，无法揭示对气候、水和生物多样性的关键影响。我们提出了 LCA 的进展，该方法将土地变化和生态系统服务的空间显式建模整合到土地利用变化改进 (LUCI)-LCA 中。通过比较两种替代的玉米和甘蔗原料产地情景下对生物塑料需求的增加，我们发现 LUCI-LCA 方法得出的结果与温室气体排放和水消耗的标准 LCA 相反，而与土壤侵蚀和生物多样性的结果则有很大不同。这种方法强调了在供应链和创新决策中包含有关土地利用变化及其相关影响将在哪里以及如何发生的信息的重要性。
