The WULCA consensus characterization model for water scarcity footprints: assessing impacts of water consumption based on available water remaining (AWARE)
By A. Boulay, J. Bare, L. Benini, Markus Berger, M. Lathuillière, A. Manzardo, M. Margni, Masaharu Motoshita, M. Núñez, A. Pastor and 4 more. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 2018
694 citations recorded by the source corpus.
PurposeLife cycle assessment (LCA) has been used to assess freshwater-related impacts according to a new water footprint framework formalized in the ISO 14046 standard. To date, no consensus-based approach exists for applying this standard and results are not always comparable when different scarcity or stress indicators are used for characterization of impacts. This paper presents the outcome of a 2-year consensus building process by the Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment (WULCA), a working group of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, on a water scarcity midpoint method for use in LCA and for water scarcity footprint assessments.MethodsIn the previous work, the question to be answered was identified and different expert workshops around the world led to three different proposals. After eliminating one proposal showing low relevance for the question to be answered, the remaining two were evaluated against four criteria: stakeholder acceptance, robustness with closed basins, main normative choice, and physical meaning.Results and discussionThe recommended method, AWARE, is based on the quantification of the relative available water remaining per area once the demand of humans and aquatic ecosystems has been met, answering the question “What is the potential to deprive another user (human or ecosystem) when consuming water in this area?” The resulting characterization factor (CF) ranges between 0.1 and 100 and can be used to calculate water scarcity footprints as defined in the ISO standard.ConclusionsAfter 8 years of development on water use impact assessment methods, and 2 years of consensus building, this method represents the state of the art of the current knowledge on how to assess potential impacts from water use in LCA, assessing both human and ecosystem users’ potential deprivation, at the midpoint level, and provides a consensus-based methodology for the calculation of a water scarcity footprint as per ISO 14046.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7baef9d3065d237fa7595ad12fdb7c1d2caf3440
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In Environmental Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Representing crop rotations in life cycle assessment: a review of legume LCA studies (2020, methodology): “The UNEP consensus for water footprint recommended by the European Environmental Bureau (2018)—the WULCA method (Boulay et al. 2018)—assesses not only the amount of water used but also the scarcity potential at a watershed level.”
- Multiple health and environmental impacts of foods (2019, neutral): “774 775 Scarcity-weighted water use is a metric that accounts for regional variation in water availability as well as 776 the water used for food production (16).”