PhD defence

Expanding the coverage of ecosystem service impacts in Life Cycle Assessment

• E. Migoni Alejandre

Date

Thursday 5 October 2023

Time

10:00 - 10:45 hour

Address

Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

Supervisor(s)

• Prof.dr.ir. P.M. van Bodegom
• Prof.dr.ir. J.B. Guinee

Summary

To contribute to the body of knowledge aiming at a better coverage of ecosystem service assessment in LCA studies, this thesis dived into the challenges of incorporating existing ecosystem service methods within the impact assessment phase of the conventional LCA framework. Through this thesis, we present an overview of ecosystem service categories that could represent an optimal coverage for their inclusion in LCA, and provide a clear example on how to overcome the challenges of characterizing key environmental impacts that are otherwise missing or misrepresented in LCA results and that influence the quality and supply of ecosystem services. We demonstrate the approach proposed with the development of readily applicable CFs that will allow future LCA studies to account for land use impacts on pollinator abundance, and provide further evidence on the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration as a way to strengthen our capacity to estimate anthropogenic impacts, with the use of expert elicitation methods as a valuable tool to fill in key data gaps.

PhD dissertations

Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.

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