Prospective Characterization Factors for Assessing Climate Change Impacts in Life Cycle Assessments

Prospective life cycle assessment (pLCA) is a future-oriented approach that estimates the environmental impacts of products and systems under future technological changes, market dynamics, and policy shifts. However, pLCA lacks consistent prospective characterization factors (pCFs) to assess the climate impacts of future emissions and align the inventory and impact assessment phases. This work produces pCFs by integrating gas-specific climate parameters with future emission scenarios from the Integrated Assessment Models (IAM). Prospective Global Warming Potential (pGWP20, pGWP100) and Global Temperature change Potential (pGTP50, pGTP100) are computed for emission years until 2050. Relative to present-day CFs, methane pGWP100 varies from −8% to +23%, and nitrous oxide varies from −17% to +7%. CH4 pGTP100 shifts from −24% to +22%, while N2O pGTP100 shifts from −27% to +8%. For non-CO2-dominated activities such as rice production, climate impacts increase by 8% in terms of pGWP100. With pGTP100, impacts of ammonium nitrate decrease by 9%. When pCFs are combined with prospective background inventories, impacts are substantially lower in sectors such as steel (−44%), road transport (−58%), and cement (−31%) under pGTP100. Overall, the availability of pCFs for multiple climate metrics and IAM scenarios enables a consistent coupling of impact assessment with future-oriented inventory data, improving the robustness and coherence of pLCA.