The assessment of environmental impacts caused by land use in the Life Cycle Assessment of forestry and forest products

Abstract

Land Use Assessment involves evaluationof impacts on the biosphere caused by managerial land use actions including safeguard subjects as bioproductivity and biodiversity. This paper only deals with the biodiversity. The LCA methodology has so far been to describe the inter- ventions made using indicators. By finding a cause-effect chain, the correlation between in- tervention and final effect on the safeguard subjects has been defined, and been given a fig- ure. This line of action has been successful for most kinds of interventions. The ecosystems existing in natural biotopes are so complex, that this approach so far seems to be difficult and uncertain. In this paper the author has tried another approach. The biodiversity has been looked upon as a state function, describing the biodiversity value of any point on the earth. The environ- mental load of man’s land use is said to be defined by the difference between the potential biodiversity of the area and the actual biodiversity. The effect of a special intervention is then the difference between the actual biodiversity before and after the intervention. The author shows how this impact can be described using the knowledge of the local land structure, which is mainly due to the (partly) natural division of forestland into valuable key biotopes and vast areas with low biodiversity. The biodiversity is evaluated according to the occurrences of endangered species and the will- ingness to pay for the avoidance of the extinction of these endangered species. This base is well known from the EPS system, recently updated by Steen [2]. The authors further working along this line shows a way how to convert these basic views into practicl evaluation of land use. Although Swedish conditions and mainly forestry is discussed, this approach should be applicable to other land uses and other countries.