Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Forestry – State and Perspectives

Nacrtak Environmentally sound technologies are a key to reduce resource use and environmental impact. The paper reviews the state of knowledge of an analysis tool, life cycle assessment (LCA), by addressing three issues: 1) methodological foundations of LCA, 2) lifecycle inven­ tory modeling, and 3) environmental performance indicators for wood supply systems. The study results in the following findings: 1) LCA is still not widely used and accepted in the forest operations engineering. 2) Only a few studies are based on state-of-the-art life cycle inventory analysis. 3) The boundaries of the studied systems are often too narrow, limiting comparability with standard LCA studies. 4) Most forest-related studies are based on direct process energy input only and are neglecting environmental burdens of upstream processes. 5) »Truncated LCAs«, neglecting embodied burdens of road infrastructure and forest machines always result in an underestimation of environmental impacts or an overestimation of envi­ ronmental performance, respectively. There is a need for LCA capacity building in the forest operations community, on the basis of which forest-related LCA studies should become more comprehensive and comparable with studies of the core LCA community.