Mitigation Life Cycle Assessment: Best Practices from LCA of Energy and Water Infrastructure That Incurs Impacts to Mitigate Harm

Emily Grubert and Jennifer Stokes-Draut
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Emily Grubert: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 790 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
Jennifer Stokes-Draut: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and ReNUWIt Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-17

Abstract: Climate change will require societal-scale infrastructural changes. Balancing priorities for water, energy, and climate will demand that approaches to water and energy management deviate from historical practice. Infrastructure designed to mitigate environmental harm, particularly related to climate change, is likely to become increasingly prevalent. Understanding the implications of such infrastructure for environmental quality is thus of interest. Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) is a common sustainability assessment tool that aims to quantify the total, multicriteria environmental impact caused by a functional unit. Notably, however, LCA quantifies impacts in the form of environmental “costs” of delivering the functional unit. In the case of mitigation infrastructures, LCA results can be confusing because they are generally reported as the harmful impacts of performing mitigation rather than as net impacts that incorporate benefits of successful mitigation. This paper argues for defining mitigation LCA as a subtype of LCA to facilitate better understanding of results and consistency across studies. Our recommendations are informed by existing LCA literature on mitigation infrastructure, focused particularly on stormwater and carbon management. We specifically recommend that analysts: (1) use a performance-based functional unit; (2) be attentive to burden shifting; and (3) assess and define uncertainty, especially related to mitigation performance.

Keywords: life cycle assessment; energy; water; climate; mitigation; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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