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.

野生传粉昆虫在全球粮食生产中发挥着核心作用，但当前最常用的环境影响评价方法——生命周期评价（Life Cycle Assessment, LCA）中，尚未纳入针对野生传粉昆虫的评估环节。这一现状主要源于数据可获取性限制以及与LCA清单的兼容性不足。为填补这一研究空白，本研究借助德尔菲评估（Delphi assessment）获取了相对传粉昆虫丰度的估算值：本次评估共有25位专家参与，他们覆盖16个国籍、来自45个具备专业研究基础的国家，为24类土地利用类型分别给出了对应预期丰度的低、典型、高值评分。基于上述估算结果，本研究提出了一套全球通用的特征化因子（characterization factors, CFs），可将土地利用类型转化为对野生传粉昆虫丰度的相对影响值。本研究同时展示了该套特征化因子的相关不确定性，并辅以示例性案例以说明其在LCA研究中的适用性。本研究推荐采用德尔菲评估过程中达成共识的估算结果所生成的特征化因子，这类因子具备良好的易用性，且能够有效区分不同土地利用类型间的关键差异。本研究生成的特征化因子可作为将传粉昆虫影响纳入LCA研究的第一步，同时也验证了专家征询法可作为填补关键环境影响表征数据缺口的有效工具。