Global water consumption impacts on riverine fish species richness in Life Cycle Assessment

Reduced river discharge and flow regulation are significant threats to freshwater biodiversity. An accurate representation of potential damage of water consumption on freshwater biodiversity is required to quantify and compare the environmental impacts of global value chains. The effect of discharge reduction on fish species richness was previously modeled in life cycle impact assessment, but models were limited by the restricted geographical scope of underlying species-discharge relationships and the small number of species data. Here, we propose an effect factor model based on a novel regionalized species-discharge relationship (SDR) from which we derive characterization factors. Our SDR-based model covers 88% of the global landmass (excluding deserts and permanently frozen areas) and is based on a global dataset of 11,450 fish species, simulated river discharge, elevation, and climate zones. We performed 10-fold cross-validation to select the best set of predictors and validated the obtained SDRs based on observed discharge data. Our model performed better than previous SDRs employed in life cycle impact assessment. We provide both marginal and average models for assessing scenarios of small and large-scale water consumption, respectively, and include regional and global species loss. The characterization factors are provided with uncertainty range estimates in 2,320 river basins worldwide. We conducted an illustrative case study to showcase the method’s applicability.

PIERRAT Eleonore;  BARBAROSSA Valerio;  NÚÑEZ Montserrat;  SCHERER Laura;  LINK Andreas;  DAMIANI Mattia;  VERONES Francesca;  DORBER Martin; 

2022-09-28

ELSEVIER

JRC129569

0048-9697 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969722058016,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC129569,   

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.158702 (online),