Evaluation of Long-Term Impacts in LCA
May 7, 2004
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Dear colleagues,
We are happy to invite you to the 22nd Discussion Forum on LCA, which will take place on May 7, 2004 ETH Zurich, Switzerland from 9.00 to 17.00.
In Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), decision makers are often faced with tradeoffs between current and future impacts. Such tradeoffs raise issues of (intergenerational) fairness and equity that are ethical in nature. Life-Cycle Assessment involves many of such temporal issues. One typical example is waste incineration, where immediate emissions to the air from the incineration process have to be weighted against far future emissions of slag landfills.
The goal of Discussion Forum 22 is to present and discuss arguments in favor and in contra of a temporally differentiated weighting of impacts and to provide input for LCIA method development. To these ends,
· time aspects present in LCI and LCIA will be presented
· temporal preferences will be discussed from an ethical point of view
· discounting in economics and its transferability to environmental problems will be discussed, and
· statements in favor and in contra of a temporally differentiated weighting are given.
Main speakers will be Gabor Doka, Mark Huijbregts, Patrick Hofstetter, Ruedi Müller-Wenk, Anton Leist, Stefanie Hellweg and Rolf Frischknecht.
The attendants of the discussion forum are encouraged to contribute (see application form to submit an abstract) to and participate in the discussions.
The preliminary progam and the application form are available on the following website: http://www.texma.org/LCA-Forum/lca-forum.html (Litterature about this topic will be available 10 days before the forum on the following website)
We hope that the Forum will be of interest for you and we are looking forward to meeting you in Zürich,
Stefanie Hellweg, Rolf Frischknecht
Posted on March 30, 2004