Dear Colleagues,

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is increasingly used as a tool for evaluation of the environmental performance of products and services as well as of the environmental consequences of strategies and policies, both on the institutional and commercial level. Often, LCA studies are used for decision support in the context of long-term investments, consequences of certain policy measures, or development of processes and technologies within a long-time horizon.

However, in current practice, the LCA framework is somewhat limited when it comes to future-oriented LCA: Inventory data are mostly based on current or even past processes, consequences in economic sectors other than the one in focus are hardly and poorly considered, rebound effects are often ignored, and potential future developments—be they economic, social, or environmental—are rarely accounted for in a consistent way. Further, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods usually reflect current or past conditions, and the temporal aspects of different indicators (e.g., GHG emissions) are still not yet integrated. These limitations are often motivated and justified by, e.g., the lack of inventory data reflecting a future state of the economy, by inherent uncertainties in future developments, by difficulties in predicting consequences of decisions, or by lack of consistent economic and technologic scenarios. However, in a context when LCA studies are used for decision support for a long-term perspective, these limitations make reaching such an objective impractical.

This Special Issue aims at presenting current practice and limitations in future- and decision-oriented LCA and at discussing innovative approaches for overcoming these limitations. We welcome papers that report ideas on how to integrate methods from other areas of research into LCA, such as economic modeling, forecasting tools, machine learning tools, agent-based modeling, and scenario analysis.

Prof. Dr. Ben Amor
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Consequential life cycle assessment
• Life cycle inventory
• Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods
• Innovative modelling approaches
• Economic modeling
• Forecasting tools
• Machine learning tools
• Agent-based modeling
• Scenario analysis