Utility of spatially explicit LCA for agricultural territories.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a methodological framework that estimates environmental impacts of products, systems or services in a life cycle perspective at local to global scales. Some environmental impacts, however, can vary depending on the characteristics of their surroundings and therefore on the location of the activity. This variability can be taken into account in impact assessment using spatialized LCA. Spatial differentiation is especially relevant when studying territories (ca. 100-10,000 km), which often have high heterogeneity in environmental characteristics. In this study, we focus on defining a method to apply spatialized LCA to study land-use planning in an agricultural territory. In light of agricultural impact assessment, we suggest a future method for spatialized territorial LCA, which is currently being tested on an agricultural territory, the Lieue de Greve watershed in Brittany, France.