Green finance and environmental life cycle assessment

This Mendeley Data deposit contains the dataset extracted from a literature review on the integration of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with green/sustainable finance, focusing on how environmental results are translated into metrics, rules, and financial decision mechanisms. The collection includes structured records by study (IDs) containing: characterization of the research design (empirical/modeling/conceptual), analysis scale (project, asset, portfolio, market), type of financial instrument/arrangement (e.g., green corporate bonds, carbon credits and carbon markets, regulatory metrics such as the Green Asset Ratio, project finance under the Equator Principles, and fintech-enabled mechanisms such as tokenization/crowdfunding), and the role played by LCA in the instrument’s governance (eligibility, pricing, risk management, monitoring, and verification). For each study, core LCA elements were coded: functional unit (when available), system boundaries (e.g., cradle-to-gate, cradle-to-grave, phase-specific cut-offs), main impact categories (e.g., climate/GWP, eutrophication, toxicity, water use, and resource depletion), databases and impact methods (when reported), and the mode of integration with economic variables (NPV/IRR, climate cost-effectiveness, avoided impact per unit of capital, conversion into credits/carbon price signals, and price-adjustment coefficients). Recurrent findings and constraints were also documented, including: sensitivity to scenarios and baseline choices, limited methodological standardization and project-level disclosure in post-issuance reporting, greenwashing risks linked to proprietary methodologies, and information asymmetries in cross-border contexts with diverging regulatory regimes. In addition, the deposit includes a similarity-analysis output (graph) and an associated interpretive text, highlighting the centrality of the “environmental–impact–assessment” core and two dominant LCA to finance translation regimes: (I) regulatory/classification pathways (taxonomies and indicators) and (II) market/pricing pathways (credits, trading, and carbon price signals). These data can be reused for meta-syntheses, instrument-by-instrument comparative analyses, and methodological advances in MRV and the standardization of green finance metrics.