title: Product carbon footprints and their uncertainties in comparative decision contexts.
abstract: In response to growing awareness of climate change, requests to establish product carbon footprints have been increasing. Product carbon footprints are life cycle assessments restricted to just one impact category, global warming. Product carbon footprint studies generate life cycle inventory results, listing the environmental emissions of greenhouse gases from a product's lifecycle, and characterize these by their global warming potentials, producing product carbon footprints that are commonly communicated as point values. In the present research we show that the uncertainties surrounding these point values necessitate more sophisticated ways of communicating product carbon footprints, using different sizes of catfish (Pangasius spp.) farms in Vietnam as a case study. As most product carbon footprint studies only have a comparative meaning, we used dependent sampling to produce relative results in order to increase the power for identifying environmentally superior products. We therefore argue that product carbon footprints, supported by quantitative uncertainty estimates, should be used to test hypotheses, rather than to provide point value estimates or plain confidence intervals of products' environmental performance.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Patrik J G
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Henriksson
authors.affiliation: Department of Econometrics and Operations Research, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, VU University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Reinout
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heijungs
authors.affiliation: Department of Coastal Aquaculture, College of Aquaculture and Fisheries, Can Tho University, Vietnam.
authors.forename: Hai M
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Dao
authors.affiliation: Research Institute for Aquaculture No. 2, Department of Inland Resources & Fisheries Capture, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
authors.forename: Lam T
authors.initials: LT
authors.lastname: Phan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Geert R
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: de Snoo
authors.affiliation: Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jeroen B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Guinée
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D058572:Carbon Footprint; D002397:Catfishes / Q000254:growth & development*; D005398:Fisheries; D008954:Models, Biological; D014744:Vietnam