Water Footprinting: How to Address Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment?

By Markus Berger, Matthias Finkbeiner. 2010

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As freshwater is a vital yet often scarce resource, the life cycle assessment community has put great efforts in method development to properly address water use. The International Organization for Standardization has recently even launched a project aiming at creating an international standard for ‘water footprinting’. This paper provides an overview of a broad range of methods developed to enable accounting and impact assessment of water use. The critical review revealed that methodological scopes differ regarding types of water use accounted for, inclusion of local water scarcity, as well as differentiation between watercourses and quality aspects. As the application of the most advanced methods requires high resolution inventory data, the trade-off between ‘precision’ and ‘applicability’ needs to be addressed in future studies and in the new international standard.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/725e0092ac83cbdcb406f5fe5cecb41154812c44

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. Other
2. M. Traverso
3. A. Lehmann
4. Erwin M. Schau
5. C. Basset-Mens
6. Marc A. Rosen
7. Matthias Finkbeiner
8. S. Payen

In Ocean Engineering

1. Other
2. Enrique Herrera-Viedma
3. C. Basset-Mens
4. Huchang Liao
5. S. Payen
6. S. Perret

In Water Science and Technology

1. Other
2. C. Basset-Mens
3. S. Payen
4. S. Perret

Citations in the corpus

• Towards efficient use of water resources in Europe (2012, methodology): “In the context of reviewing LCA methods, Berger and Finkenbeiner (2010) suggest that the original WFA approach can be integrated into LCA calculations by adding a weighting factor.”
• LCA of local and imported tomato: an energy and water trade-off (2015, background): “There are several reviews on LCA methods for the modelling of freshwater use impacts (Berger and Finkbeiner, 2012, 2010; Jeswani and Azapagic, 2011; Kounina et al., 2013).”
• Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (2010, background): “More recently, evaluation approaches for single environmental issues like Carbon Footprinting [6] and Water Footprinting [7] have received considerable attention.”
• Ten Years of Sustainability (2009 to 2018): A Bibliometric Overview (2018, background): “2 Water footprinting: how to address water use in life-cycle assessment? [23] Berger, M.”