Impact Assessment: Life Cycle Impacts

This lecture introduces the IMPACT World+ framework for evaluating life cycle impacts, focusing on a wide range of impact categories such as climate change, ozone layer depletion, resource use, acidification, eutrophication, and more. The framework includes midpoint level indicators and damage level indicators, covering areas of protection and concern. It also discusses impact profiles, including short-term and long-term climate change, human health impacts, and ecosystem quality. The lecture explains how to include regionalization in life cycle impact assessment, using substance-specific characterization factors to calculate impact scores. In conclusion, IMPACT World+ provides a comprehensive approach to assessing environmental impacts, incorporating factors like spatial variability and uncertainty.