Dynamic environmental assessment: scenarios, foresight and challenges

Abstract

With the environmental challenges in recent years, the assessment of impacts of human activity becomes a major issue for our societies. Nowadays it is well established that our activities can cause negative effects on the balance of the ecosystem. In order to asses our impacts, several tools and methodologies, such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), Carbon Footprint, etc. have been developed. Each of these approaches have some limitations with respect to their ability to meet the increasingly operational needs of stakeholders, experts and policy makers. For example, the lack of temporal dimension in LCA is one of the major limitation. Recent research suggested a dynamic approach taking into account the temporal. This paper aims to present a road-map for an integrated framework for an efficient assessment of dynamic LCA in the production sector of wheat.