A Request from Lise Laurin: Please Help Review the Newest Segment of the LCA Capability Roadmap

The Covid-19 pandemic is giving us all a good lesson in the importance of contributing to one’s community. Today, I’m asking members of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) community to contribute to theirs, by assisting in an important step in the LCA Capability Roadmap development process.

The Roadmap is a way of identifying cross-cutting issues that affect all LCA practitioners and establishing broad consensus on needs and priorities, with an eye towards coordinating research activities and maximizing their benefits. While the topic is huge, we tried to identify the next steps needed to move us forward in understanding how certain we can be about our results. We would like your confirmation that we’re putting research on the right track.

When you offer your expertise and perspective, you help make LCA a more powerful tool, and make all of us more effective at reducing the impacts of our organizations and our societies.

I’ve been involved in the process for 6 years under the auspices of the now Joint SETAC-ACLCA Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Interest Group. Over the past three years, I and about 35 other practitioners and researchers have been developing the Roadmap’s latest segment, Addressing Ill-Characterized Uncertainty in LCA.

Among the topics addressed are uncertainty in inventory and characterization factors, ways of handling modeling choices, and software development needs. The draft broadly assesses the existing landscape and work that needs to be done to address current shortcomings. A series of milestones identifies short, medium, and long-term research needs.

The roadmap segment is available for public comment until June 30, 2020, and can be found here. I hope you’ll take a few minutes to give it some consideration. Your comments can be shared with the committee using this template and addressed to me, Lise Laurin at [email protected].

Thanks in advance for lending your thoughts to this process. Constant improvement of our methodologies, procedures, and tools is important part of maintaining the professional standards of the sustainability community. It will pay ongoing dividends to all of us, and our successors.

Photo by Flickr User Marco Verch, used under Creative Commons