Progress on Carbon Balancing in Life Cycle Assessment with a Focus on the Ecosystem Service Contribution

Authors

Rugani B., Allocco M.

Reference

Towards Net-Zero Carbon Initiatives: a Life Cycle Assessment Perspective, pp. 229-263, 2024

Description

It is undoubtful that anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions largely contribute to current impacts on climate change. However, biogenic carbon emissions may also play a meaningful role to the global balance of GHGs, which should not be neglected. This is an important factor for the development of carbon management plans to decrease the carbon footprint generated by production life cycles at various scales: product design, operations, and territorial dynamics. Current evidence, standards, and guidelines on GHGs inventories recommend to duly incorporate information of carbon removal and storage. To allow organizations achieve net-zero GHGs balance, those accounting protocols also lead towards market-based voluntary schemes for carbon credits acquisition. However, some uncertainty and a lack of transparency still occur in the way carbon credits are quantified and traced. The hypothesis proposed and discussed in this chapter is about designing a carbon management scheme based on established “mitigation hierarchy” frameworks successful in the field of ecosystem services and biodiversity offsetting. The rationale is to couple carbon footprint results via Life Cycle Assessment evaluations with on-field measurements of the increase in carbon sequestration from restoring natural capital. The delta of gain in such an ecosystem service can be used to compensate residual emissions and reach carbon neutrality.

Link

doi:10.1142/9789811275661_0012