title: Assessment of Life Cycle Impacts on Ecosystem Services: Promise, Problems, and Prospects.
abstract: The analysis of ecosystem services (ES) is becoming a key-factor to implement policies on sustainable technologies. Accordingly, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods are more and more oriented toward the development of harmonized characterization models to address impacts on ES. However, such efforts are relatively recent and have not reached full consensus yet. We investigate here on the transdisciplinary pillars related to the modeling of LCIA on ES by conducting a critical review and comparison of the state-of-the-art in both LCIA and ES domains. We observe that current LCIA practices to assess impacts on "ES provision" suffer from incompleteness in modeling the cause-effect chains; the multifunctionality of ecosystems is omitted; and the "flow" nature of ES is not considered. Furthermore, ES modeling in LCIA is limited by its static calculation framework, and the valuation of ES also experiences some limitations. The conceptualization of land use (changes) as the main impact driver on ES, and the corresponding approaches to retrieve characterization factors, eventually embody several methodological shortcomings, such as the lack of time-dependency and interrelationships between elements in the cause-effect chains. We conclude that future LCIA modeling of ES could benefit from the harmonization with existing integrated multiscale dynamic integrated approaches.
authors.affiliation: Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) , Department of Environmental Research & Innovation (ERIN), 41 Rue du Brill, 4422 Belvaux, Luxembourg.|Vrije University Amsterdam , Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 1105 De Boelelaan, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Benoit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Othoniel
authors.affiliation: Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) , Department of Environmental Research & Innovation (ERIN), 41 Rue du Brill, 4422 Belvaux, Luxembourg.
authors.forename: Benedetto
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rugani
authors.affiliation: Vrije University Amsterdam , Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 1105 De Boelelaan, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Reinout
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heijungs
authors.affiliation: Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) , Department of Environmental Research & Innovation (ERIN), 41 Rue du Brill, 4422 Belvaux, Luxembourg.
authors.forename: Enrico
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Benetto
authors.affiliation: Vrije University Amsterdam , Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, 1105 De Boelelaan, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Cees
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Withagen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical