Spatializing environmental footprint by integrating geographic information system into life cycle assessment: A review and practice recommendations

Abstract Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodological tool that estimates the environmental footprint from a cradle-to-grave perspective. With the increased need for the geographically explicit assessment, the geographic information system (GIS) is integrating into LCA as a frontier methodology to spatialize the environmental footprint. This paper reviews a total of 105 publications about GIS-LCA, including 50 methodological studies that are analyzed following the four phases of LCA and 55 applied studies that are classified into different domains. The review shows that although GIS-LCA methodology has certain explorations and practices and a large number of cases are carried out in the energy industry, agricultural sector, urban facility, and waste management, the current knowledge system faces several challenges in spatializing environmental footprint. In this case, a universal methodology framework of GIS-LCA and specific schemes are proposed to address the following issues: (1) how to set up a geographically referenced system in the goal and scope definition phase; (2) how to spatialize life-cycle data and integrate and compute foreground and background data in the inventory analysis phase; (3) how to develop spatialized characterization factors with different requirements on resolution and data availability in the impact assessment phase; and (4) how to uniform the contribution analysis of different zones, unit processes, and elementary flows to visualize spatialized environmental footprint in the interpretation phase. The framework we developed provides preliminary practices and recommendations for spatializing environmental footprint, which lays a foundation to support future work.