Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Taiwan University, 71, Chou-Shan Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan.
Department of Safety, Health and Environmental Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, 1, University Rd., Yanchao Dist., Kaohsiung City 824, Taiwan.
Sci Total Environ. 2021 Jun 15;773:145018. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145018. Epub 2021 Jan 29.
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely applied approach used to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product or service across its life cycle stages; however, the impacts of land use on ecosystem services are less addressed in most LCA studies. This study, therefore, aims to improve the LCA model by incorporating a new impact category of land use on ecosystem services at both midpoint and endpoint levels in the existing ReCiPe2016 impact assessment method. The impacts of land use in the LCA model included land occupation and land transformation. The soil quality-based indicator, soil organic carbon (SOC), was adopted to quantify the soil quality change in ecosystem services caused by land use. A site with contaminated soils was adopted to validate the proposed impact assessment approach and to compare the results of various remediation practices. Our results revealed that the characterization factors (CFs) varied with the type of land use intervention, with land occupation of settlements presenting the highest CFs and land occupation of forest presenting the most negative CFs and thus benefitting ecosystem services. These results were well reflected in the case study, while the type of land intervention was the key factor determining the impact level. The results suggested that long-term occupation, high contamination levels, and high material or energy use contributed to relatively higher impacts of land use on ecosystem services. The proposed approach enables the quantification of land use impacts on ecosystem services as expressed in monetary loss or benefit at the endpoint resource level. The impact assessment results indicated that the in situ bioremediation scenario contributed relatively higher impacts ($12,667 USD) than the excavation and thermal treatment scenario ($-37 USD). These monetary assessment results are informative and are expected to be used in the decision-making process towards achieving beneficial environmental outcomes.
生命周期评价（LCA）是一种广泛应用的方法，用于评估产品或服务在其整个生命周期阶段的环境影响；然而，在大多数 LCA 研究中，土地利用对生态系统服务的影响较少得到关注。因此，本研究旨在通过在现有 ReCiPe2016 影响评估方法的中点和终点水平上纳入土地利用对生态系统服务的新影响类别，来改进 LCA 模型。LCA 模型中的土地利用影响包括土地占用和土地转化。采用基于土壤质量的指标——土壤有机碳（SOC）来量化土地利用对生态系统服务中土壤质量变化的影响。采用受污染土壤的场地来验证所提出的影响评估方法，并比较各种修复实践的结果。研究结果表明，特征化因子（CFs）随土地利用干预类型的不同而变化，其中定居点的土地占用呈现出最高的 CFs，而森林的土地占用则呈现出最负的 CFs，从而有益于生态系统服务。这些结果在案例研究中得到了很好的反映，而土地干预的类型是决定影响水平的关键因素。结果表明，长期占用、高污染水平和高物质或能源使用导致了土地利用对生态系统服务的相对较高影响。所提出的方法能够量化土地利用对生态系统服务的影响，表现为终点资源水平上的货币损失或收益。影响评估结果表明，原位生物修复情景比挖掘和热处理情景（$-37 美元）贡献了相对更高的影响（$12667 美元）。这些货币评估结果具有信息性，预计将在实现有益环境成果的决策过程中得到应用。
