Life cycle methodology
A variety of methodologies build on life cycle thinking to assess and understand the impacts of products, services, and organisations. This page brings together resources on methodologies within the life cycle field, covering a range of perspectives and focus areas.
Approaches to life cycle assessment
Depending on the purpose and context, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can be applied using a range of different methodologies. Some approaches focus on describing the environmental impacts of existing systems, while others assess the consequences of decisions or explore future scenarios. The following section introduces various LCA approaches and highlights their different applications and perspectives.
Beyond carbon
While climate change has become a central focus of sustainability efforts, it represents only one dimension of a much broader challenge. Issues such as biodiversity loss, freshwater use, chemical pollution, resource use, and social well-being also influence long-term sustainable development. Life cycle thinking can help illuminate these interconnected issues and support more holistic decision-making across value chains.
Exploring multiple dimensions of sustainability
Life cycle assessment (LCA) was developed to evaluate a range of environmental impacts across the life cycle of products and services. Standardized frameworks and methods, such as ISO 14040/14044 and the Environmental Footprint (EF) method, enable the assessment of various impact categories, including climate change, acidification, eutrophication, toxicity, resource use, and more. However, complementary approaches such as Water Footprint and Social LCA (S-LCA) have also been developed to provide deeper insights into specific environmental and social issues. By exploring these sustainability challenges and approaches in greater depth, life cycle thinking can support more informed decision-making across multiple dimensions of sustainability.
Environmental impacts in monetary terms
Environmental impacts can be difficult to consider alongside technical and economic criteria in decision-making. Expressing environmental impacts in monetary terms is one approach that aims to make sustainability aspects easier to compare and integrate into established decision-making processes.
Background
By translating environmental impacts into a common unit, such as monetary values, it is possible to compare trade-offs and support decision-making in areas such as product development, design, and policy. Monetary values can be derived in several ways, including from market values for goods and services, restoration costs, prevention costs, and estimates of lost economic productivity. More broadly, these approaches seek to quantify the costs imposed on society, for example through effects on human health, ecosystem services, resource availability, or the measures required to prevent, mitigate, or compensate for environmental damage. The Environmental Priority Strategies (EPS) system is one example of such a method. It is a systematic approach for evaluating and comparing design options in product and process development, supported by a database of monetary values for environmental impacts associated with elementary flows.
