Some Modeling Challenges in Dynamic Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has been a mainstream tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of products, services, and systems. Current LCAs inherently rely on the static basis and commonly fail to include temporal considerations. To better assist in the decision-making for sustainable development, dynamic LCA has been initiated to answer more complex and interdisciplinary questions. As in its initial phase, dynamic LCA faces many modeling challenges that at the same time are meaningful research opportunities. In modeling dynamic LCA, there are several key aspects that need more attention for contribution and close collaboration across the first three phases of the LCA framework.