ACTIVITIES

Stakeholder workshop

Quantifying emissions and environmental impacts of pesticides in life cycle assessment: Building on the pesticide consensus effort.

Tuesday, 13 October 2020, 15:00-18:00
LCA Food pre-conference workshop
Virtual from Berlin, Germany

Background: Current pesticide field emission modelling and toxicity characterisation approaches suffer from several shortcomings, including unclear boundaries between Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) phases, environmental compartment mismatches between LCI databases and LCIA methods, missing characterisation factors, compartments in impact assessment, and impact pathways. The Glasgow consensus workshop in 2013 started a consensus building process with three scientific workshops and a stakeholder workshop. In order to operationalise the resulting recommendations for harmonising the emission quantification and impact characterisation of pesticides in life cycle assessment (LCA) and product environmental footprinting, the OLCA-Pest project („Operationalising Life Cycle Assessment for Pesticides“, 2017-2020, funded by ADEME) was implemented with nine partner institutions. The present workshop informs about the main outcomes of the OLCA-Pest project and the consequences for LCI databases, LCIA assessment and LCA practice related to assessing pesticides in LCA.

Goals of the workshop:

  • Inform about the main outcomes and recommendations from the OLCA-Pest project as follow-up of the ‘pesticide consensus in LCA’ effort
  • Show the practical implications for LCI database developers, LCA software providers, LCA practitioners and decision makers
  • Show potentials and limitations of the proposed methodology, data and tools
  • Show the practical usage of the tools and methodologies developed within OLCA-Pest along LCA case studies in different agricultural systems

Who is concerned?

Open to all interested parties, but particularly targeted to:
  • LCI database developers
  • LCA software providers
  • LCA practitioners and researchers across sectors
  • Decision makers and sustainability managers from companies

Tentative programme:

  • Overview of the OLCA-Pest project
  • PestLCI Consensus web-based model
  • LCI-LCIA model linking, default emission fractions, recommendations for LCI DB and LCA practitioners
  • Selected LCA case studies
  • Lessons learnt, interpretation of toxicity results, potentials, limitations and sensitivity
  • Outlook and future research needs
On behalf of the OLCA-Pest project team:

Peter Fantke                              Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

Thomas Nemecek                    Agroscope, LCA Research Group, Zürich, Switzerland

Claudine Basset-Mens           CIRAD, Montpellier, France

Philippe Roux                           ITAP, Irstea, Univ. Montpellier, Montpellier, France

Assumpció Antón                     IRTA Torre Marimon, Spain

Christel Renaud                       Univ. Bretagne Loire, ESA-INRA, 49007 Angers, France

Pierre Naviaux               Comité interprofessionnel du vin de Champagne (CIVC), France

Operationalising Life Cycle Assessment of Pesticides (OLCA-Pest)
Contact Thomas Nemecek
Contact Peter Fantke
Registration