Local emissions, local impacts: how LCA may evolve to include local detailed damage estimates

LCA studies have the strength to investigate the life cycle to detect any relevant process and related emission that may impact on ecosystems and human health; but, almost all LCA has taken the shortcut of first summing the emissions over all stages and then multiplying the result by site independent impact indices (reaching at best the national or continental resolution); spatial and temporal details at the local scale impacted by site specific emissions (e.g. stack emissions) are not accounted for. Some procedures have been proposed to couple the LCA approach with methods that could provide more spatially detailed damage estimations. One is the IPA (impact pathway analysis) developed under the Externe project and following works; it aimed to track the fate of a pollutant from where it is emitted to the affected receptors (population, crops, forests, buildings, etc.). This work involves a multidisciplinary system analysis, with inputs from engineers, dispersion modellers, epidemiologists, ecologists and economists. Whether an IPA of a single source or an LCA of an entire cycle is required, in general depends on the policy decision in question. One of the most relevant part of such a coupled IPA and LCA approach is the modeling of pollutant spatio-temporal fate in actual environment and human populated areas. In recent decades there was a huge development in modeling technical knowledge, that allows to reconsider the results achieved by the Externe project and that is promising in providing new ways to be coupled with the LCA approach. Some of these features will be shown in a specific study regarding a relevant local emitter activity, one of the biggest European coal power plant located in Apulia, Italy: the LCA approach can help in identifying relevant emitted species at the site, while a well assessed dispersion modeling system with adequate information input categories (orography, meteorology, land use and georeferenced population) provides a detailed space-time exposure fields to estimate actual damage response. How to integrate and make a robust new procedure with the “good” of both the approach is the perspective of this work.