Department of Green Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Department of Biology, Marine Biology, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281/S8, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Sci Total Environ. 2021 May 20;770:144747. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.144747. Epub 2021 Jan 25.
The transformation of ecosystems is known to be a major driver of biodiversity loss. Consequently, supporting tools such as life cycle assessment methods (LCA) include this aspect in the evaluation of a product's environmental performance. Such methods consist of quantifying input and output flows to assess their specific contributions to impact categories. Therefore, land occupation and transformation are considered as inputs to assess biodiversity impacts amongst others. However, the modelling of biodiversity impact in deep seafloor ecosystems is still lacking in LCA. Most of the LCA methods focus on terrestrial biodiversity and none of them can be transposed to benthic deep sea because of knowledge gaps. This manuscript proposes a LCA framework to assess biodiversity impacts in deep seafloor ecosystems. The framework builds upon the existing methods accounting for biodiversity impacts in terrestrial and coastal habitats. A two-step approach is proposed, assessing impacts on regional and on global biodiversity. While the evaluation of regional biodiversity impacts relies only on the benthic communities' response to disturbance, the global perspective considers ecosystem vulnerability and scarcity. Those provide additional perspective for the comparison of impacts occurring in different ecosystems. The framework is operationalised to a case study for deep-sea mining in the Clarion Clipperton Fractures Zone (CCZ). Through the large variety of data sources needed to run the impact evaluation modelling, the framework shows consistency and manages the existing limitations in the understanding of deep seafloor ecosystems, although limitations for its application in the CCZ were observed mainly due to the lack of finer scaled habitat maps and data on connectivity. With growing interest for commercial activities in the deep sea and hence, increased environmental research, this work is a first attempt for the implementation of LCA methods to deep-sea products.
生态系统的转变被认为是生物多样性丧失的主要驱动因素。因此，生命周期评估方法（LCA）等支持工具将产品环境绩效评估纳入这一方面。这些方法包括量化投入和产出流，以评估其对影响类别的具体贡献。因此，土地占用和转化被视为评估生物多样性影响等方面的投入。然而，LCA 中仍缺乏深海海底生态系统生物多样性影响的建模。大多数 LCA 方法侧重于陆地生物多样性，由于知识差距，它们都不能转用于海底深海。本文提出了一种用于评估深海海底生态系统生物多样性影响的 LCA 框架。该框架建立在现有的方法基础上，这些方法考虑了陆地和沿海生境中的生物多样性影响。提出了一种两步法，评估区域和全球生物多样性的影响。虽然区域生物多样性影响的评估仅依赖于底栖群落对干扰的响应，但全球视角则考虑了生态系统的脆弱性和稀缺性。这些为比较不同生态系统中发生的影响提供了额外的视角。该框架应用于克拉里昂-克利珀顿区（CCZ）深海采矿的案例研究。通过运行影响评估建模所需的大量数据源，该框架显示出一致性，并管理了对深海海底生态系统理解的现有局限性，尽管在 CCZ 中应用该框架时观察到了一些局限性，主要是由于缺乏更精细尺度的栖息地地图和连通性数据。随着人们对深海商业活动的兴趣日益浓厚，因此对环境研究的需求也在增加，这项工作是首次尝试将 LCA 方法应用于深海产品。
