Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions released into the atmosphere in ever rapidly growing volumes are most likely to be responsible for this change. D.Ĭlimate change and land use have become a major challenge for mankind and the natural environment. How can LCA approaches contribute to improve geo-cycles managementĬarreiras, M. The comparison of the results obtained with both traditional and dynamic LCA approaches shows that the difference can be important enough to change the conclusions on whether or not a biofuel meets some given global warming reduction targets. Dynamic LCA is applied to the US EPA LCA on renewable fuels, which compares the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of different biofuels with fossil fuels including land-use change emissions. This case study demonstrates that the use of global warming potentials for a given time horizon to characterize greenhouse gas emissions leads to an inconsistency between the time frame chosen for the analysis and the time period covered by the LCA results. Although generally applicable to any impact category, this approach is developed here for global warming, based on the radiative forcing concept. Then, time-dependent characterization factors are calculated to assess the dynamic LCI in real-time impact scores for any given time horizon. This approach consists of first computing a dynamic life cycle inventory (LCI), considering the temporal profile of emissions. A dynamic LCA approach is proposed to improve the accuracy of LCA by addressing the inconsistency of temporal assessment. The lack of temporal information is an important limitation of life cycle assessment ( LCA). Levasseur, Annie Lesage, Pascal Margni, Manuele Deschênes, Louise Samson, Réjean Considering time in LCA: dynamic LCA and its application to global warming impact assessments.