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

1. 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 increasein lands external to the US in the event that US capability is exceeded.