Characterization Factors to Assess Land Use Impacts on Pollinator Abundance in Life Cycle Assessment

While wild pollinators play a key role in global food
production,
their assessment is currently missing from the most commonly used
environmental impact assessment method, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
This is mainly due to constraints in data availability and compatibility
with LCA inventories. To target this gap, relative pollinator abundance
estimates were obtained with the use of a Delphi assessment, during
which 25 experts, covering 16 nationalities and 45 countries of expertise,
provided scores for low, typical, and high expected abundance associated
with 24 land use categories. Based on these estimates, this study
presents a set of globally generic characterization factors (CFs)
that allows translating land use into relative impacts to wild pollinator
abundance. The associated uncertainty of the CFs is presented along
with an illustrative case to demonstrate the applicability in LCA
studies. The CFs based on estimates that reached consensus during
the Delphi assessment are recommended as readily applicable and allow
key differences among land use types to be distinguished. The resulting
CFs are proposed as the first step for incorporating pollinator impacts
in LCA studies, exemplifying the use of expert elicitation methods
as a useful tool to fill data gaps that constrain the characterization
of key environmental impacts.