A Multimedia Hydrological Fate Modeling Framework To Assess Water Consumption Impacts in Life Cycle Assessment

Many new methods have recently been
developed to address environmental
consequences of water consumption in life cycle assessment (LCA).
However, such methods can only partially be compared and combined,
because their modeling structure and metrics are inconsistent. Moreover,
they focus on specific water sources (e.g., river) and miss description
of transport flows between water compartments (e.g., from river to
atmosphere via evaporation) and regions (e.g., atmospheric advection).
Consequently, they provide a partial regard of the local and global
hydrological cycle and derived impacts on the environment. This paper
proposes consensus-based guidelines for a harmonized development of
the next generation of water consumption LCA indicators, with a focus
on consequences of water consumption on ecosystem quality. To include
the consideration of the multimedia water fate between compartments
of the water cycle, we provide spatial regionalization and temporal
specification guidance. The principles and recommendations of the
paper are applied to an illustrative case study. The guidelines set
the basis of a more accurate, novel way of modeling water consumption
impacts in LCA. The environmental relevance of this LCA impact category
will improve, yet much research is needed to make the guidelines operational.