Environmental Assessment of Water Use

Worldwide increasing water shortage requires assessing the environmental impacts of water consumption. However, water use has been neglected in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) in the past. Only recently it has become more relevant, especially with the assessment of water intensive food and biofuel products.

We developed a comprehensive regionalised impact assessment method for water use including the following aspects:

• Analysis of water consumption patterns in industry and other economic sectors
• Qualitative vulnerability analyses of the changing availability of water resources, identifying stress factors on diverse ecosystems and human groups in different regions
• Description and quantification of the cause-effect chains (integration of vulnerability-assessment results and potential environmental effects)
• Adaptation of the proposed assessment method to the most important LCA methodologies and existing life cycle inventories (LCI)
• Water footprint methodology
• Application to LCA of agricultural products
• Water Resources in Bio-Fuels Production

This project started with the doctoral thesis of Stephan Pfister