Preface

1 The winding road to eco-innovation in Latin America

Companies are increasingly seeking to become more profitable and competitive in a globalized market. These goals require augmenting the productivity of their processes and an efficient use of resources (Schmidt and Nakajima 2013). Innovation is a response to this objective through research and development (R&D), generating new knowledge. However, companies sometimes run the risk of not realizing that there is a positive return on investment in R&D (Baumann and Kritikos 2016). The lack of evaluation of this return on investment tends to discourage innovation strategies (Dong et al. 2014).

At the same time, economic growth and the development of enterprises collide with a series of energy constraints, resource shortages, and environmental problems that require problem-solving strategies to provide a holistic approach. Similarly, governments must also face various problems when it comes to improving the living conditions of their citizens. Traditionally, these key parameters have been monitored and analyzed from a socioeconomic perspective, considering the quality of life conditions of citizens such as poverty, malnutrition, inequality, and climate change. Thus, companies and governments understand the importance of promoting economic growth with social responsibility and environmental care, in other words, of fostering sustainability.

In this context, eco-innovation arises, a concept which, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), is defined as “the creation or implementation of new or significantly improved products (goods and services), process, marketing methods, organizational structure, and institutional arrangements which—with or without intent—lead to environmental improvements compared to relevant alternatives” (OECD 2009). In addition, innovation is a concept that is scarcely linked to social and environmental aspects (Bossle et al. 2016), whereas eco-innovation considers social, economic, and environmental dimensions for the innovation of products and processes (Hellström 2007).

Eco-innovation can be understood as the link between competitiveness and sustainability, which seeks traditional ways of mitigating either environmental impacts or advanced ways, making innovation a battle to reduce the use of natural resources from design, production, use, reuse, and recycling of products and materials, i.e., throughout the product life cycle.

The concept of eco-innovation is relatively new, which explains the fact that it has not been internalized sufficiently within the management of organizations. Companies to date have only taken initiatives to adopt green technology, environmental management systems, and other specific activities (Bossle et al. 2016), but these are still far from being considered eco-innovative companies or organizations. Thus, businesses need to explicitly consider eco-innovation in their strategies.

There are different factors (internal and external) that influence considering eco-innovation in the strategies of organizations. According to Bossle et al. (2016), the external factors are regulatory pressure, market demand, cooperation, and redevelopment of industrial technology, which boost the adoption of the concept of eco-innovation by companies.

Regulatory pressure and market demand are key factors because more governments are legislating in order to preserve the environment, and consumers have become more demanding, opting for eco-friendly products. Stakeholder cooperation with suppliers, clients, consultants, and universities contribute to obtaining products and processes that are less harmful to the environment.

Cost savings, environmental capability, environmental managerial concern, human resources, and environmental culture are some of the most important internal factors observed. If organizations obtain cost savings through environmental improvements and have the capability to integrate their competences and resources in order to carry out environmental innovation (environmental capability), they will invest in eco-innovation. Whenever executives, managers, and human resources are trained and involved in innovation processes with sustainable criteria (environmental managerial concern and human resources), it will be easier to integrate eco-innovation in the business or institutional strategies. Finally, the environmental culture of the institutions or companies will seek that each member has a positive behavior toward sustainability and competitiveness.

With the influence of internal and external factors, eco-innovation seeks competitiveness through the efficient use of resources and the innovation of their processes and products considering sustainability criteria, such as the mitigation of environmental impacts using cleaner technologies with social responsibility. Therefore, eco-innovation is in line with the concept of sustainable development, as shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Conceptual framework and motivation factors of eco-innovation

On the other hand, eco-innovation has been considered an important topic because of the interest in this subject from an academic point of view, which is mirrored in the relevant number of published papers linked to eco-innovation (Bossle et al. 2016). These researches contribute with a new focus, tools, and methodologies to the implementation of eco-innovation in the government and companies by policy makers and managers. In spite of a dynamic and intense debate around the world regarding the ratification of environment-oriented treaties worldwide (e.g., the recently ratified Treaty of Paris), businesses recognize the need to respond to the new environmental requirements that are set through policies and demanded by consumers, despite the difficulties many of them find when trying to become green (Walley and Whitehead 1994; Pujari et al. 2004).

However, these difficulties have been reduced substantially in the developed world, mainly in Oceania, Europe, and North America, thanks to the building of a complex and interactive system in which policies passed through a variety of different layers of government in continuous negotiation with a wide range of industrial sectors have created a reciprocal process where eco-innovation is engendered by the private sector and regulated by governments to control and expand its application (Cooke 2011).

In contrast, access to eco-innovation in developing and emerging economies is still limited (Ockwell et al. 2010), since most of these developing nations face a series of barriers that impede the full development of eco-innovation within their domestic economic systems. In fact, an OECD environment working paper written by Ockwell et al. (2010) highlights the lack of international support to link eco-innovation with indigenous (i.e., local or regional) capabilities. In other words, policy at an international level focuses too much on delving into how existing eco-innovative possibilities would adapt to these new contexts, rather than fostering and enhancing situations in which developing nations can produce their own eco-innovative strategies (Bell 2009; Ockwell et al. 2010).

Hence, rather than prioritizing the transfer of hardware knowledge in the field of eco-innovation, there is an increasing interest from international organizations and NGOs to foster the transfer of know-how to these nations through capacity building and the exchange of research experiences (Ockwell et al. 2008). Nevertheless, it should be noted that certain drawbacks will appear following this perspective, due to the reluctance of certain well-positioned companies to stimulate unwanted competition in emerging economies, on the one hand, and to the fact that policy making needs to be improved substantially to account for the specific technological and cultural contexts that eco-innovation will face at the local, regional, and national levels, on the other (Eckerberg and Nilsson 2013).

In this context, a widely known methodology that is applied in numerous corporate and policy making situations is that of life cycle assessment (LCA), a tool that analyzes the interconnected stages of a specific production system (good or service) from the acquisition of raw materials up to final disposal of residues (Hellweg and Mila i Canals 2014). Although further developed in the academic world through universities and research centers than in any other sector, businesses around the world have started to recognize that the use of LCA and other life cycle approaches constitute a solid response to the challenges of sustainable development and to develop a robust strategy toward eco-innovation progress in the corporate world (Robèrt et al. 2002; Sala et al. 2013). For instance, many multinational companies, especially in the agro-industrial sector, now have life cycle sections within their sustainable development areas, and in the cases of France or Colombia, collaborative associations between industrial, institutional, and scientific actors have been developed (CECODES 2014; SCORELCA 2016). For instance, in France, an association named SCORELCA was created in 2012 to share information and promote dissemination of LCA studies (SCORELCA 2016).

In this worldwide context, LCA and other life cycle perspectives have slowly started to gain leadership in the Latin America, Caribbean (LAC) region, ever since a small, but ever-growing, scientific community started to identify and disseminate the benefits that LCA could offer in terms of corporate decision-making and public policy design. Moreover, the current economic and environmental context of the region and its relationship with the diverse worldwide supply chains requires a holistic approach that helps mitigate the environmental effects related to all the life cycle stages of goods and services. Thus, LCA is an ideal tool to better understand these consequences and mitigate them, locally, regionally, and globally. Additionally, the diverse supply chains that connect the LAC region with the rest of the world increasingly demands the use of environmental certifications for exported products.

At a regional level, the Ibero-American Life Cycle Network (ILCN), became, a decade ago, the first regional organization in which stakeholders from the LAC region (and Spain and Portugal) could share, promote, and disseminate their contributions to the LCA world. In fact, one of the main goals of the ILCN is to build and strengthen capacities of academics, managers, and public policy makers in the use of these life cycle approaches and methodologies. Furthermore, on a biannual basis, the ILCN organizes an International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment in Latin America (CILCA), a conference in which the main scientific advancements in LCA in the region are presented, as well as the ongoing application of the methodology to different industrial sectors and their integration with public policies. In 2015, the sixth edition of the CILCA conference was held in the city of Lima (Peru), where over 180 oral presentations and posters were presented.

The main goal of this Special Issue is to present selected LCA studies, submitted to CILCA 2015, and related to the application of LCA in the Ibero American region as a route to achieving eco-innovation in the region.

2 Development of the special issue

CILCA 2015 was presented as a multidisciplinary conference in which a wide range of life cycle issues was accepted, including methodological advancements; the application of LCA in public policies; or the development of numerous case studies in diverse productive sectors, such as agriculture, building, biofuels, or wastewater treatment. However, when a look back is taken to the final disposition of oral presentations, it can be observed that the total amount was skewed considerably towards agrifood topics. This observation is in line with the fact that Latin America’s agricultural production is highly dependent on the export of different types of food products. However, it is also worth noting that other primary sector activities, namely, mining or the extraction of fossil fuels, which are important within the regions’ GDP, have been repeatedly absent, not only in CILCA 2015 but also in previous CILCA events. The causes that explain the uneven implementation of life cycle thinking methods through sectors in the region are somewhat heterogeneous. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that there are two main causes behind this circumstance. On the one hand, despite the efforts of UNEP and some national authorities (e.g., Chile, Mexico, or Brazil), the lack of national life cycle inventories is an endemic problem in the region, limiting the certainty of the results presented in case studies (Beltran et al. 2016). On the other hand, it seems as if important multinational companies that have developed LCA schemes within their organigrams are yet to export this expertise to their subsidiaries in Latin America.

Unevenness in the region does not only occur in terms of productive sectors. Important disparities have been identified between nations in terms of the overall implementation of life cycle methods. Interestingly, the existence of a national LCA network tends to be a crucial trigger for the proliferation of life cycle studies. In fact, the region has experienced a steady increase in the number of national LCA networks. For instance, the recent development of a national network in Ecuador has been accompanied by new publications in the field (Salas et al. 2015). The creation of similar structures in Venezuela and Bolivia in the upcoming months is expected, a circumstance that would leave a limited number of South American countries without a national network.

In contrast, the situation in the Caribbean and Central America is substantially different, with the exception of Costa Rica and Cuba, which currently possess a robust national network. Hence, for nations in these two subregions, it will be imperative to augment the number of trained experts in LCA and other life cycle perspectives. However, linguistic barriers between nations or the reduced size of these countries may constitute relevant limitations to the expansion of LCA networks in the region. Hence, strategies to achieve this objective may include the creation of clusters of countries with similar characteristics which share geographical proximity. Moreover, the role of the Ibero-American LCA Network and the International Life Cycle Initiative of UNEP will be crucial in the introduction of dissemination activities and introductory workshops. Despite these barriers in the subregion, there have been certain advancements in the region, including studies on social-LCA on biofuels in Jamaica destined to policy support (Chargoy Amador et al. 2015) or sustainable building in Trinidad and Tobago (Iwaro and Mwasha 2013).

2.1 Agriculture, forestry, and biofuels

When analyzing the articles published in this Special Issue in more detail, a total of nine were linked to the agricultural or forestry sectors (including in both cases, biofuel production). Within this group, a first block of papers was linked to the environmental performance of horticultural products in the Ibero-American region. Firstly, Ribal et al. (2016) analyzed a relevant sample (over 250 farms) of organic and conventional systems for the production of citrus in the main producing area in Spain: Valencia, highlighting the high variability identified in both farming systems in terms of environmental impact. In addition, they suggest that this high standard deviation may be intimately linked to the degree of mechanization on farms or to the size of these. A second study, developed in Tucumán (Argentina), studies the influence that the technological level of the sugar industry has on the final environmental performance of the products: alcohol and sugar (Nishihara Hun et al. 2016). The main results indicate that high-level technology guarantees better environmental performance, although the economic and social sustainability aspects of this production system were excluded from the scope of the study. A third study, by Vázquez-Rowe et al. (2016a), analyzed the environmental impacts of agricultural activities along the hyperarid Peruvian coast. The selected product, pomegranate (Punica granatum), of which Peru is becoming an incipient exporter, appears to present high productivity in a region in which the agricultural frontier tends to expand in desert areas (Vázquez-Rowe et al. 2016b). Despite the fact that the article focuses on the direct land use changes due to the expansion of the agricultural frontier and on the greenhouse gas emission benefits that this implies, the authors acknowledge the threats that this dynamic may cause in the long run due to the water stress that is being inflicted on the dwindling coastal aquifers.

A second block of papers linked to the agricultural sector included contributions from Brazil. Sánchez-Moore et al. (2016) analyzed the appropriateness of using vinasse and filter cake, both residues from the prominent bioethanol industry in Brazil. For this, they implemented two separate LCA perspectives: attributional and consequential, arriving at similar conclusions. Results proved that the use of these residues rather than fertilization with inorganic chemical fertilizers creates an improved environmental profile, although results may be strongly influenced by the content of nitrogen in the vinasse.

Another Brazilian study that is strongly linked to the use of chemical fertilizers is the one presented by Matsuura et al. (2016). More specifically, the synergies that are created between the combined production of sunflower and soybean in the Brazilian cerrado are analyzed using LCA and compared to the production of these two crops as monocultures. The results confirm the benefits of combining nitrogen-fixing legumes with other plant species in a production system, although the authors advocate an optimization of the use of chemical fertilizers to reduce environmental impacts. In addition, the environmental benefits of the dual crop system are highly dependent on the allocation strategy that is considered in the assessment. Finally, in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the prevention of land use changes, especially in areas with native vegetation, appeared to be the dominant environmental hotspot. A third study by Willers et al. (2016), in this case linked to the environmental analysis of semi-intensive beef cattle production system in Northeast Brazil, confirms the environmental benefits of substituting nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers by organic fertilizers.

A final study in this block, Kulay et al. (2016), delves into the production of a widely used pesticide in Brazil: thiophanate-methyl, a benzimidazole precursor employed for pest control throughout a wide range of crops, such as soybean, cotton, beans, rice, tomatoes, or citrus crops. Typically, most agriculture LCA studies do not analyze in depth the way in which plant protection agents are produced, since these tend to have a much lower environmental impact than the production of fertilizers (Meisterling et al. 2009; Roy et al. 2009; Vázquez-Rowe et al. 2016b), as well as other on-field activities. Hence, unless toxicity impact categories are being included within the scope of the study, pesticides tend to have a discreet contribution to overall impacts. In contrast, Kulay and colleagues provide a deep analysis of the life cycle of this pesticide, highlighting the main environmental hotspots through the production process and proposing a series of cleaner production propositions to reduce the impact of this type of products, such as improved wastewater treatment or energy recovery. Undoubtedly, this study is an important step forward regarding the inclusion of more case-specific modeling for plant protection agents in agriculture.

A final block of primary sector-oriented papers is made up of two studies that deal with the production of biofuels in the region and their comparison with conventional fossil fuels. On the one hand, Morales et al. (2016) analyze a production system linked to the use of eucalyptus in Chile to produce domestic bioethanol that can be blended with gasoline. According to the authors, the E5 blend implies a series of environmental improvements in most impact categories as compared to regular gasoline, but these improvements tend to dwindle when an E10 blend is proposed. On the other hand, Castanheira and Freire (2016) analyze the tradeoffs of using palm biodiesel in Portugal, in which the biofuel is imported from Colombia. The authors generate a series of scenarios in which they analyze the combination of different fertilization (e.g., poultry manure, urea, or ammonium sulfate), biogas management (i.e., flared or released), and direct land use change (dLUCs) alternatives. The results demonstrated that the final environmental impacts in terms of GHG emissions were highly dependent on the dLUCs linked to the expansion of palm plantations. Palm, a perennial crop, showed that it tends to sequester carbon whenever it is substituting previous shrubland, grassland, or other crops but shows very high net emissions when tropical deforestation occurs to ensure its cultivation. Nevertheless, when biogas is captured flared at the oil extraction mill, GHG emission reductions of up to 60 % can be attained. Results for the remaining impact categories assessed were highly contradictory due mainly to the selection of a specific fertilization scheme for palm cultivation.

Interestingly, neither of the studies in which biofuels were assessed address the issue of indirect land use changes (iLUCs), despite the fact that numerous studies highlight the scarce benefits that biofuels have when an expansion of the system boundaries to account for these iLUCs is considered (Searchinger et al. 2008; Hertel et al. 2010), especially in areas where land for biofuels may compete directly with areas rich in carbon storage potential and biodiversity such as tropical and subtropical primary and secondary forests.

2.2 Construction and building

Three articles linked to the building sector were included within the Special Issue. Firstly, Ochoa Sosa et al. (2016) compared the life cycle energy and costs linked to the construction and occupation of social housing in areas with different urban planning: compact and sprawling neighborhoods. The former appear to have reduced environmental impacts in terms of energy usage for a specific case study in Mexico City, whereas sprawling neighborhoods also present increased energy and land costs. The study, though concentrating on Mexico City, could be easily replicable for other urban metropolitan areas in emerging cities in the LAC region, since the urbanization trends described in this specific article are not common in European and North American cities. In other words, we consider that a study of these characteristics has an interesting potential in urban planning in the region.

Rodrigues and Freire (2016), though also centered in the building sector, focus on the environmental sustainability of building retrofit, which they considered an important aspect to be taken into consideration in the historic district of Coimbra. The results interestingly suggest that extra insulation levels in this type of construction may lead to increased environmental impacts due to the high embodied impacts of the materials used. In fact, the authors identify tradeoffs between the amount of insulation employed to improve the building and the amount of energy needed in the operation phase, an interesting finding that could help steer policies in historic districts in southern Europe where a relevant part of the population still lives in historic houses or buildings. Despite the fact that this study is probably not as replicable in the LAC region, lessons learned could be of utility in the transformation of vast urban areas in which the thriving middle class is demanding increased comfort in their households.

Articles in this section demonstrate the utility of using life cycle methods applied to the construction sector to answer miscellaneous research questions, contributing to the sustainable development of the LAC region: (i) understanding how the increasing sprawl of urban areas in the region can be done in a more sustainable manner, (ii) identification of sustainable materials to improve the habitability of historic buildings, and (iii) the application of low-cost environmentally - friendly solutions for modest housing in tropical environments.

2.3 Software development

Software development in LCA has always been an ongoing activity, in which the improvement of databases and computational software has been the main objective. However, we argue that an underdeveloped issue in life cycle studies is the development of tools that can aid LCA practitioners and stakeholders to make data compilation efficient and less tiresome. In this line of thinking, Torres et al. (2016) have developed a combined software that allows farmers to calculate their own GHG emissions based on the information they handle at the farm. The main idea of this software is to combine clarity and reduced time consumption in filling the primary data with a comprehensive analysis of the farms. The IPCC method is used to compute the results following the guidelines fixed by PAS 2050. Furthermore, an uncertainty analysis and a graphical representation of hotspots were provided to combine easily interpretable results for farmers and relevant LCA results for practitioners.

On the other hand, YUPI® is software that has been developed to raise awareness among the local population in Argentina in terms of life cycle environmental impacts that are a consequence of their daily routines and habits (Arena et al. 2016). The software provides users with an easy-to-use computation of ecological, carbon, and water footprint adapted to regional conditions in Argentina when possible but maintaining calculation emission factors of widely used assessment methods, such as those from IPCC or the Water Footprint Network, as well as guidelines such as the PAS 2050 from Carbon Trust (IPCC 2006; BSI 2011). Interestingly, the software also delves into specific ways through which citizens can reduce their impact on the environment.

2.4 Reviews

Valdivia et al. (2016) is the final published contribution in this Special Issue. Its main objective was to describe the implementation of LCA and life cycle management (LCM) in the LAC region in the period from 2005 to 2014. Four main blocks are analyzed for such a purpose in those countries of the LAC regions that had developed a life cycle network by 2014: (i) the expansion of training activities linked to LCA and/or LCM, (ii) the availability of LCA studies, (iii) the existence of an operational national LCA database, and (iv) the existence and developed actions of national networks. The results presented indicate that Spanish-speaking nations in the LAC region, together with Brazil, are the key actors in the expansion of LCA in the region. Moreover, the authors establish a certain degree of correlation between the existence of LCA databases and the development of LCA-based policies and regulations (e.g., Brazil and Mexico). It is concluded that future actions in the existing national networks should focus on fostering alliances with the private sector to expand the utility of life cycle methods in business case studies. Similarly, increased political will could trigger the advancement of improved national databases and the disclosure of financial resources for such a purpose. Furthermore, all countries should continue supporting training activities to expand the number of professionals with skills in LCM, although it should be the international community who should support these activities in nations in which life cycle networks are still to be created.

3 Future steps

LCA and other life cycle methods, such as water or carbon footprint, appear to have consolidated in the region as robust environmental sustainability methods to be applied in numerous productive sectors. In fact, an increasing number of research centers and universities in the LAC region have incorporated life cycle thinking in their strategy. Based on the recently released 2015 QS University Rankings, 19 Latin American universities appear among the top 500 universities in the world (QS Top Universities 2016). Out of these, three universities are represented through case studies in this Special Issue, including the University of São Paulo, number one in the region, demonstrating that LCA is becoming a strategic methodology in this area.

However, despite this proliferation, there are still many challenges for the full development of life cycle methodologies in the LAC region (Hou et al. 2015). For instance, the development of consequential studies is scarce while not non-existent in the region, a circumstance that can be interpreted as a weakness when supporting policy makers in certain sectors, such as biofuels (Vázquez-Rowe et al. 2014). However, Sánchez-Moore et al. (2016) set an interesting precedent in the current Special Issue for the development of this life cycle perspective in the region.

The combination of LCA and other life cycle methods with other methodologies, such as multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), other management tools, such as data envelopment analysis (Avadí et al. 2014), or spatial management tools (e.g., GIS) (Escamilla and Habert 2015), is still performed in very few cases, which hinders the potential utility of life cycle methods in policy and business support. For instance, the use of operational research, including MCDA, in combination with LCA could imply a step forward in the optimization of industrial and agricultural processes in the region (Azapagic and Clift 1999).

Other life cycle tools, such as social LCA, life cycle costing, or life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) have been developed in recent years (Benoît et al. 2010; Valdivia et al. 2013). There has been much talk about the methodological structure of these relatively new methods, although their implementation in actual case studies is uneven worldwide. However, despite the fact that the present Special Issue does not cover studies in which these methods were applied, they are slowly starting to be implemented with case studies specific to the LAC region (Luo et al. 2009; Franze and Ciroth 2011).

Finally, from a methodological perspective, the region lacks experience when it comes to developing specific characterization factors at a local and regional level, although certain experiences have already been developed for desertification (Núñez et al. 2010). Nevertheless, global assessment methods, such as the Impact World + method (Boulay et al. 2011; Helmes et al. 2012), have recently included regional characterization factors for different regions at a global level.

4 Threats

The current economic downfall in South America, although not extensive to the entire LAC region, may constitute an important barrier for the consolidation of investment in life cycle projects and studies. In fact, the lack of good economic prospects may hinder the willingness of multinational companies to develop or expand their environmental sustainability programs in the region (The Guardian 2015; Forbes 2016).

Another potential drawback could be linked to the insufficient number of LCA practitioners that are currently active in the region. Although numbers vary from 4 to 18 practitioners per 10 million inhabitants according to the results published by Valdivia et al. (2016), these values are only available for those nations in which a life cycle network has been implemented, so it is plausible to presume that numbers may be even lower for most LAC nations. Further capacity building, which has already been implemented at different levels, with the support of the Life Cycle Initiative (UNEP) and the national LCA networks, as well as the proliferation of life cycle topics in master and doctorate programs across the continent, appear as two solid ways forward to consolidate the know-how needed to maintain and improve the utility of LCA in the region.

Finally, it should be noted that in a globalized world, the lack of investment in life cycle projects and databases in such a vast continent rich in biotic and abiotic raw materials may constitute a relevant limitation for the proliferation and quality of other studies elsewhere that could benefit from these databases.

5 Opportunities

Medellin will host the seventh International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment in Latin America in June 2017 (i.e., CILCA 2017). This event will be of interest in order to identify if the increase in life cycle-oriented studies in Latin America not only consolidates but also diversifies to a broader number of industrial sectors. For instance, in the case of water and wastewater treatment, LCA has proved to be a very useful tool to aid policy makers and companies when it comes to improving old plants or developing new ones (Corominas et al. 2013; Niero et al. 2014). A proliferation of studies in this sector, which are recently being developed at a national level in many megacities across the region, as well as in solid wastes, mining, or traffic, would definitely demonstrate that the LCA community in the region is on the right track toward integrating the main productive sectors and is managing to expand and increase the number of active practitioners in the region.

Despite a series of economic threats described above, new opportunities, such as the H2020 or ERANET-LAC funding schemes in the European Union, include substantial funding for cooperative projects between European and LAC partners (ERANET-LAC 2016; European Commission 2016). Similarly, many LAC region national governments, such as Ecuador (Prometeo), Peru (Concytec), or Chile (CONICYT), have created or improved their national research funding schemes in recent years, granting additional money to support doctoral students, research programs, or incentives for researchers to publish in international journals. Funding opportunities that have recently arisen are also linked to the Green Climate Fund of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, aimed at boosting investment funds for low-emission and climate-resilient development, especially in developing and emerging countries (GCF 2016). The importance of many ecosystems in the region, and the need to preserve them whilst controlling the sprawl of human activities, is a crucial challenge in which life cycle tools may have a say (Davidson et al. 2012).

Another window of opportunity arises with the proliferation of the Product Environmental Footprints (PEFs) for a wide range of products in different nations, namely, in the European Union (European Commission 2013). A pilot example of these is that of coffee, in which European stakeholders are using European Union policy developments to engage with other stakeholders in coffee-producing nations, such as Costa Rica, Peru, and Colombia (ECF 2016). This strategy allows the development of a standardized method that all stakeholders can use as a common way to identify the environmental profile of coffee-based products and improve the performance of these products, as well as allowing them to communicate their environmental profile in a transparent and reliable manner (ECF 2016). In this context, the example of coffee can be an opportunity for other agricultural products in the LAC region to improve their environmental information and establish alliances with wholesalers and retailers in the main consuming nations in Europe.

6 Conclusions

The concepts of sustainability, competitiveness, and eco-innovation have proven to be intimately related in the race toward attaining a world that provides welfare within the desired standards of sustainable development. Years of research in North America and Europe have shown that life cycle approaches, such as LCA, can be key methods to help academia and industries to foster the principles of sustainable development. However, given the data inventory-intensive characteristics of LCA, it is necessary to expand this know-how to other regions of the world to account for the globalized economy that we live in. In this context, the development of a strong LCA community in the LAC region is of the utmost importance to guarantee an integral environmental understanding of raw materials and products produced in this area of the world. The Special Issue Life Cycle Assessment: a tool for innovation in Latin America aims to be a small step in this direction, publishing relevant articles presented at the CILCA 2015 conference in Lima that can be of interest for policy makers, regional industry, NGOs, and for LCA practitioners elsewhere in the world who may use this Special Issue as an opportunity to engage new partnerships in the region.