A Review of Approaches to Treat Uncertainty in LCA

It is important to know to what extent the outcome of an LCA is affected by various types of uncertainty, such as parameter, scenario and model uncertainty. These types may occur in the goal and scope definition, the inventory analysis and the impact assessment of an LCA. Information on the uncertainty of the model outcomes provides useful information to assess the reliability of LCA-based decisions and to guide future research towards reducing uncertainty. This paper reviews several approaches to treat different types of uncertainty in LCA. It will discuss the typology of uncertainty that may be encountered in LCA, the qualitative and quantitative techniques that are available to address these uncertainties, the inclusion of these techniques in LCA software tools, the (graphical) possibilities to show uncertainty in LCA outcomes, ways to simplify the uncertainty analysis, the inclusion of uncertainty analyses in case studies and (the difficulties in) the interpretation of uncertainty information.