title: Harmonizing the assessment of biodiversity effects from land and water use within LCA.
abstract: Addressing biodiversity impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) has recently been significantly improved. Advances include the consideration of several taxa, consideration of vulnerability of species and ecosystems, global coverage and spatial differentiation. To allow a comparison of biodiversity impacts of different stressors (e.g., land and water use), consistent approaches for assessing and aggregating biodiversity impacts across taxa are needed. We propose four different options for aggregating impacts across taxa and stressors: equal weight for species, equal weight for taxa and two options with special consideration of species' vulnerability. We apply the aggregation options to a case study of coffee, tea and sugarcane production in Kenya for the production of 1 kg of crop. The ranking between stressors (land vs water use) within each crop and also of the overall impact between crops (coffee>sugarcane>tea) remained the same when applying the different aggregation options. Inclusion of the vulnerability of species had significant influence on the magnitude of results, and potentially also on the spatial distribution of impacts, and should be considered.
authors.affiliation: †Industrial Ecology Programme, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway.
authors.forename: Francesca
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Verones
authors.affiliation: ‡Institute for Water and Wetland Research, Department of Environmental Science, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Mark A J
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Huijbregts
authors.affiliation: §Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Abhishek
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chaudhary
authors.affiliation: §Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: de Baan
authors.affiliation: ⊥Professorship of Ecological Services, Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, University of Bayreuth (BayCEER), 95440 Bayreuth, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Koellner
authors.affiliation: §Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hellweg
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D044822:Biodiversity; D028241:Camellia sinensis; D040503:Coffea; D018556:Crops, Agricultural; D007630:Kenya; D031786:Saccharum; D014867:Water
chemical_list: D014867:Water