Life cycle assessment to support the European Green Deal
This report provides an overview of the LCA applied to assessing environmental impacts of production and consumption at the EU and Member State levels as a basis to support several policies and the assessment of their impacts and benefits. The content builds from the results of the “Application of the consumption footprint indicators in policy analysis” (AA Consumption Footprint) project , aimed at further develop and apply the set of indicators defined and calculated in the context of the LC-IND2 project , namely the Consumption Footprint and the Domestic Footprint.
The EU-27 can be considered a “net importer of environmental impacts”. This implies that the Consumption Footprint (overall impacts related to consumption of good and services) is higher than the Domestic Footprint (impacts generated in the EU-27 area).
Between 2010 and 2018, domestic environmental impacts in EU-27 have decreased (-12% as weighted score) while GDP has increased of 23%, showing an absolute decoupling. Yet accounting for trade, a more limited relative decoupling is observed for the Consumption Footprint (increase by 5%, relative decoupling). Moreover, a number of impacts cannot be fully captured so far, indicating the need of including in future more aspects to depict comprehensively the decoupling.
Results show that the environmental impact of the consumption of an average EU citizen is outside the safe operating space for humanity for several impacts, namely climate change, particulate matter, freshwater ecotoxicity.
SANYE MENGUAL Esther;
SALA Serenella;
Sanye Mengual, E. and Sala, S., Consumption Footprint and Domestic Footprint: Assessing the environmental impacts of EU consumption and production, EUR 31390 EN, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2023, ISBN 978-92-76-99781-8, doi:10.2760/3878, JRC128571.
2023-02-23
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC128571
978-92-76-61754-9 (online),
978-92-76-99781-8 (print),
1831-9424 (online),
1018-5593 (print),
EUR 31390 EN,
OP KJ-NA-31-390-EN-N (online),
OP KJ-NA-31-390-EN-C (print),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128571,
10.2760/218540 (online),
10.2760/3878 (print),
