Exploring the boundaries of life cycle analysis in environmental hazard assessment

Abstract

Assessment of environmental hazards to and of the food system is vital to underpin effective decision making and intervention. In this study we combine a comprehensive literature review and a four-step analysis to investigate whether life cycle analysis (LCA) can and should be applied for environmental hazard analysis. We reveal that the current LCA methodological framework, although comprehensive, can only be used for certain aspects of hazard assessment and has significant limitations in applications to food system. Our results indicate that while LCA effectively quantifies chemical hazards such as emissions in the air, water and land, and physical hazards such as use of natural resources, water and land, it provides limited insight into biological and broader physical hazards. There are different challenges related to use of LCA in this context including insufficient hazard coverage, data availability, quality and complexity, need of assessing risks at a local level and inaccuracies related to global averages as well as which metrics are deployed. We discuss how LCA thus requires further scientific enhancement on new impact categories, integration with other tools, development of dynamic models utilising spatially and temporally differentiated data, and harmonisation with the hazard models and risk assessment methods used in development of policy interventions. While building upon existing widespread use, enhancement of LCA in this way could provide a means to generate a platform of seamlessly integrated tools covering the full range of environmental hazards in the food system.