Development of a Land Use Inventory and Metric for Life Cycle Assessment

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Development of a Land Use Inventory and Metric
for Life Cycle Assessment Christine Costello,
Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering Advisors W. Michael Griffin, PhD,
Exec. Dir. Of Green Design Institute and Prof. H.
Scott Matthews CEE EPP
Goal Create a method to quantify how human
consumption patterns affect land use. Motivation
Land is a limited and vital resource, use and
disturbance of land results in many negative
environmental consequences (e.g., greenhouse gas
emissions, nitrate emissions, loss of
biodiversity). As populations and demand for
land intensive products increase so does the need
to understand how land is utilized to produce
goods and services.
Figure 1. Conceptual land use inventories from
production (left) and consumption (right)
perspectives. Values on the left are preliminary
actual values for the lower 48 US (million
acres) values on the right are hypothetical but
based on reality.
Approach Publicly available data will be used to
create the production inventory of how land is
currently occupied in the US (left pie chart,
Figure 1). Economic Input-Output Life Cycle
Assessment (EIO-LCA) methods and consumer
expenditure data will be used to generate data
about how land is consumed directly and
indirectly, i.e., the consumption pie chart,
Figure 1. Future land use scenarios will be
modeled by increasing the consumption of
various products (e.g., domestic meat, biofuels).
Increase in production land use categories
will be constrained by the land area of the US
and consideration will be given to quantity of
arable land. Multiregional IO methods will be
used to approximate increase in lands external to
the US in the event that US capability is
exceeded.