How can you use life cycle assessment to measure the environmental impact of your tourism services?

1 What is LCA?

LCA is a systematic and comprehensive approach that considers all the stages of a product, service, or system's life cycle. It identifies and quantifies the inputs and outputs of materials, energy, water, and emissions, and assesses their potential environmental impacts. LCA can help you compare different options, identify hotspots, and prioritize improvement actions. LCA can also support your decision making, marketing, and reporting on sustainability.

2 How to conduct LCA?

To conduct an LCA, you need to follow four main steps: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. In the goal and scope definition, you specify the purpose, scope, and boundaries of your LCA, as well as the functional unit, which is the unit of comparison for your analysis. For example, if you want to compare the environmental impact of different modes of transportation for your tourism service, your functional unit could be one passenger-kilometer. In the inventory analysis, you collect data on the inputs and outputs of your system, such as the amount of fuel, electricity, water, and waste generated. In the impact assessment, you assign the inputs and outputs to different impact categories, such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication, and biodiversity loss. You can use different methods and indicators to measure the impact categories, depending on your goal and scope. In the interpretation, you evaluate the results, identify the main contributors to the environmental impacts, and draw conclusions and recommendations.

4 What are the challenges of LCA?

LCA is not a perfect tool, and it has some limitations and challenges that you need to be aware of. One challenge is the availability and quality of data. You need to collect reliable and representative data for your system, which can be time-consuming, costly, and difficult, especially for complex and dynamic systems. You might also need to use generic or secondary data from databases or literature, which might not reflect your specific situation or context. Another challenge is the uncertainty and variability of the results. You need to consider the assumptions, choices, and methods that you use in your LCA, and how they affect the results and conclusions. You might also need to perform sensitivity and uncertainty analysis to test the robustness and validity of your results. A third challenge is the interpretation and communication of the results. You need to be clear and transparent about the goal, scope, and limitations of your LCA, and avoid oversimplifying or misrepresenting the results. You also need to consider the perspective and expectations of your audience, and use appropriate formats and language to convey your message.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?