Characterization Factors to Assess Land Use Impacts on Pollinator Abundance in Life Cycle Assessment

Characterization Factors to Assess Land Use Impacts on Pollinator Abundance in Life Cycle Assessment

Migoni Alejandre, E. (TU Delft Environmental Technology and Design; Universiteit Leiden)
Scherer, L.A. (Universiteit Leiden)
Guinée, J.B. (Universiteit Leiden)
Aizen, Marcelo A. (Universidad Nacional del Comahue-CONICET)
Albrecht, Matthias (Agroscope)
Balzan, Mario V. (Malta College of Arts, Science & Technology)
Bartomeus, Ignasi (Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-CSIC))
Clough, Yann (Lund University)
van Bodegom, Peter M. (Universiteit Leiden)

2023

While wild pollinators play a key role in global food production, their assessment is currently missing from the most commonly used environmental impact assessment method, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This is mainly due to constraints in data availability and compatibility with LCA inventories. To target this gap, relative pollinator abundance estimates were obtained with the use of a Delphi assessment, during which 25 experts, covering 16 nationalities and 45 countries of expertise, provided scores for low, typical, and high expected abundance associated with 24 land use categories. Based on these estimates, this study presents a set of globally generic characterization factors (CFs) that allows translating land use into relative impacts to wild pollinator abundance. The associated uncertainty of the CFs is presented along with an illustrative case to demonstrate the applicability in LCA studies. The CFs based on estimates that reached consensus during the Delphi assessment are recommended as readily applicable and allow key differences among land use types to be distinguished. The resulting CFs are proposed as the first step for incorporating pollinator impacts in LCA studies, exemplifying the use of expert elicitation methods as a useful tool to fill data gaps that constrain the characterization of key environmental impacts.

agriculture
Delphi expert elicitation
ecosystem service
impact assessment
pollinator abundance

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bddb6ffa-3ff5-402a-8de7-b1e8daf47919

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c05311

0013-936X

Environmental Science & Technology (Washington), 57 (8), 3445-3454

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 E. Migoni Alejandre, L.A. Scherer, J.B. Guinée, Marcelo A. Aizen, Matthias Albrecht, Mario V. Balzan, Ignasi Bartomeus, Yann Clough, Peter M. van Bodegom, More Authors