title: Accounting for land use in life cycle assessment: The value of NPP as a proxy indicator to assess land use impacts on ecosystems.
abstract: Terrestrial land and its resources are finite, though, for economic and socio-cultural needs of humans, these natural resources are further exploited. It highlights the need to quantify the impact humans possibly have on the environment due to occupation and transformation of land. As a starting point of this paper (1(st) objective), the land use activities, which may be mainly socio-culturally or economically oriented, are identified in addition to the natural land-based processes and stocks and funds that can be altered due to land use. To quantify the possible impact anthropogenic land use can have on the natural environment, linked to a certain product or service, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool commonly used. During the last decades, many indicators are developed within the LCA framework in an attempt to evaluate certain environmental impacts of land use. A second objective of this study is to briefly review these indicators and to categorize them according to whether they assess a change in the asset of natural resources for production and consumption or a disturbance of certain ecosystem processes, i.e. ecosystem health. Based on these findings, two enhanced proxy indicators are proposed (3(rd) objective). Both indicators use net primary production (NPP) loss (potential NPP in the absence of humans minus remaining NPP after land use) as a relevant proxy to primarily assess the impact of land use on ecosystem health. As there are two approaches to account for the natural and productive value of the NPP remaining after land use, namely the Human Appropriation of NPP (HANPP) and hemeroby (or naturalness) concepts, two indicators are introduced and the advantages and limitations compared to state-of-the-art NPP-based land use indicators are discussed. Exergy-based spatially differentiated characterization factors (CFs) are calculated for several types of land use (e.g., pasture land, urban land).
authors.affiliation: Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. Electronic address: sueellen.taelman@ugent.be.
authors.forename: Sue Ellen
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Taelman
authors.affiliation: Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schaubroeck
authors.affiliation: Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: De Meester
authors.affiliation: Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium; Institute for Agriculture and Fisheries Research (ILVO), Burgemeester Van Gansberghelaan 92, B-9820 Merelbeke, Belgium.
authors.forename: Lieselot
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Boone
authors.affiliation: Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology, Ghent University, Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium; European Commission - Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES), Via E. Fermi 2749, 21027 Ispra, Italy.
authors.forename: Jo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dewulf
mesh_terms: D018533:Biomass; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D017753:Ecosystem; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*
keywords: Ecosystem health; Hemeroby; Human Appropriation of NPP (HANPP); Land use impact; Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); Net primary production (NPP)