Abstract
Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a common methodology to analyze environmental impacts of forestry systems. Although LCA has been widely applied to forestry since the 90s, the LCAs are still often based on generic Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). With the purpose of improving LCA practices in the forestry sector, we developed a European Life Cycle Inventory of Forestry Operations (EFO-LCI) and analyzed the available information to check if within the European forestry sector national differences really exist. We classified the European forests on the basis of “Forest Units” (combinations of tree species and silvicultural practices). For each Forest Unit, we constructed the LCI of their forest management practices on the basis of a questionnaire filled out by national silvicultural experts. We analyzed the data reported to evaluate how they vary over Europe and how they affect LCA results and made freely available the inventory data collected for future use. The study shows important variability in rotation length, type of regeneration, amount and assortments of wood products harvested, and machinery used due to the differences in management practices. The existing variability on these activities sensibly affect LCA results of forestry practices and raw wood production. Although it is practically unfeasible to collect site-specific data for all the LCAs involving forest-based products, the use of less generic LCI data of forestry practice is desirable to improve the reliability of the studies. With the release of EFO-LCI we made a step toward the construction of regionalized LCI for the European forestry sector.
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Acknowledgements
This work was conducted as part of the collaborative project FORest management strategies to enhance the MITigation potential of European forests (FORMIT). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 311970. The Polish research was supported by funds for science in the years 2013/2016 allocated to an international co-financed project. We thank Mait Lang, Karol Bronisz, Alain Thivolle Cazat, Stanislav Lazarov, Branko Glavonjic, and Dumitru Galupa for their review and help with data collection. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments.
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Cardellini, G., Valada, T., Cornillier, C. et al. EFO-LCI: A New Life Cycle Inventory Database of Forestry Operations in Europe. Environmental Management 61, 1031–1047 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-018-1024-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-018-1024-7