Journal article
Accounting for biodiversity in life cycle impact assessments of forestry and agricultural systems—the BioImpact metric
PAM Turner, FA Ximenes, TD Penman, BS Law, CM Waters, T Grant, M Mo, PM Brock
International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment | SPRINGER HEIDELBERG | Published : 2019
Abstract
Purpose: Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful method for assessing environmental impacts at large scales. Biodiversity and ecosystem diversity are site-specific, often complex, and difficult to generalise within an LCA framework. There is currently no globally acceptable means of assessing biodiversity within the LCA framework. We introduce, test and revise BioImpact, a method for incorporating biodiversity into an LCA framework, on four production systems (native forestry, plantation softwood timber production, cropping and rangeland grazing) in Australia. Methods: Our proposed method, a metric we call BioImpact, incorporates biodiversity and ecological impacts through a series of semi-q..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This work was supported by funding provided from the Forest and Wood Products Australia. We acknowledge the guidance provided by the Project Steering Committee (Stephen Mitchell, Tim Grant and Sarah Bekessy) in project development; the input provided by the many respondents to the surveys and the participants to a questionnaire validation workshop; and the contributions by Gabrielle Caccamo, Darren Turner, Rebecca Coburn and Stephen Roxburgh. Constructive comments by three anonymous reviewers greatly improved the manuscript.