Hi everyone,
I am working on life cycle assessment (LCA) of a food production system, and need to quantify the amount of water use. there are many methods provided within SimaPro software to do so. However, I don't know which method would be preferable.
Thanks,
There's no single solution for all lca water use problems. It depends on what you want to assess, where and when exactly.
In conditions of climate warming, adjustments should be made to existing methodological approaches for quantifying water consumption.
From my point of view, Simapro is a help program but it has many limitations. The water footprint can be calculated in an "handmade" way, following at each step the process together with the production of the food, what is being studied. This requires direct contact with food production.
Ramin Ghamkhar following reports should help you:
https://www.ecoinvent.org/files/2015_-_pfister_et_al_-_ijlca_-_assessing_water_use_in_lca_1.pdf
https://simapro.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Agri-Footprint-4.0-Part-2-Description-of-data.pdf
Dear Ramin,
As Aryan Shahabian suggests this depends on what you want to assess, or in more general terms it depends on your research questions.
There are several articles on the topic as well (as you are interested in food production system the discussion on virtual water in the second paper could be relevant):
Article Analysis of water use impact assessment methods (part A): ev...
Article Water Footprinting: How to Address Water Use in Life Cycle Assessment?
It also depends on the nature of your inventory data. If you have an inventory with regional water flows you could go for a method with regional characterization factors.
Hope this helps,
Paul
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