Abstract

Biodiversity – crucial for ecosystem health and its products and services – is being lost at an alarming rate. Several models that aim to assess biodiversity impacts in Life Cycle Assessments have been proposed, but there are still some obstacles before these models become biologically realistic and feasible. One of the major challenges to be addressed is the identification of an appropriate reference situation for biodiversity, to serve as a point of comparison for assessing changes over time. However, this reference could be a point in the past, present, or future, and its choice will imply different interpretations of land use and land transformation impacts. Here we provide a short introduction to this topic and outline the main challenges as well as possible solutions to properly incorporate biodiversity reference situations in Life Cycle Assessments.

Published in

Title: 10th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food 2016 : book of abstracts
Publisher: UCD School of Biosystems Engineering

Conference

10th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food 2016, 2016-10-19--2016-10-21, Dublin, Ireland

SLU Authors

• Lennartsson, Tommy

  • Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Associated SLU-program

SLU Swedish Biodiversity Centre


UKÄ Subject classification

Environmental Sciences
Other Natural Sciences not elsewhere specified


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/80407