Student Project
Improvement and Future Projections of the AWARE Water Scarcity Indicator for LCIA
PhD's Project - [Ongoing]
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Abstract
This project refines and extends the water scarcity footprint method Available Water Remaining (AWARE) by integrating the influence of climate change and extending AWARE’s applicability for advanced use cases. To reflect temporal dynamics and enable its use in prospective and dynamic LCA, the project updates and improves AWARE’s characterization factors (CFs), projects them into the future, and studies the impact of large water consumption inventories on AWARE CFs. The original AWARE, representing 1960–2010, was updated to better reflect current conditions through six key improvements described in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.70023.
To support prospective LCA, water availability is projected using an ensemble of climate and hydrological models under varying climate change mitigation scenarios. This allows estimation of future AWARE CFs, exploration of model-related uncertainties, and identification of drivers of change. Furthermore, the project develops a framework to link non-marginal water consumption inventories to AWARE CFs using novel LCA tools for integrative impact assessment. Overall, these advances improve the methodological consistency and transparency of AWARE and demonstrate its sensitivity to temporal input data, emphasizing the need for frequent updates and prospective CFs to accurately capture the effects of climate and socioeconomic changes on global water scarcity.
What is prospective AWARE?
