IMPACT World+

A globally regionalized method for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)

IMPACT World+ is a globally regionalized method for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), integrating multiple state-of-the-art developments as well as damages to the water and carbon areas of concern within a consistent LCIA framework. Most of the regional impact categories have been spatially differentiated and all long-term impact categories have been subdivided into shorter-term damage (the first 100 years after the emission) and long-term damage categories.

It is based on a midpoint-damage framework with four distinct complementary viewpoints to present an LCIA profile (see Methodology for more details):

  1. midpoint impacts,
  2. damage impacts,
  3. damages to human health and ecosystem quality,
  4. damages to the water and carbon areas of concerns (not yet operationalized).

IMPACT World+ enables the practitioner to account for spatial variability and to identify the elementary flows to be regionalized as a priority to increase the discriminating power of LCA.

The latest update (version 2.0.1) splits the method into three distinct versions: the Footprint version, the Expert version, and the Midpoint version. The first is proposed as a default for practitioners with a lower degree of expertise in LCA, while the Expert version is for experienced users and the Midpoint version is targeted to practitioners wanting to stay at the midpoint level.						

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