LCA: the Environmental Decision-Support Tool for Transportation

Climate change and its alarming acceleration are now proven scientific facts. Without a strict transition plan, it will disrupt lifestyles and undermine human well-being. It is now essential to integrate climate constraints into public decision-making and production methods. It is up to public decision-makers to ensure that human activities converge towards practices that respect the planet's physical limits, in order to sustain the life it supports. But the climate peril, however urgent, must not be treated to the total detriment of other environmental problems facing mankind, notably local pollution, the depletion of mineral resources, and the destruction of natural habitats leading to the loss of biodiversity. We need to be extremely vigilant to control the inevitable transfer of impacts as we negotiate the climate shift.

Environmental quantification is one of the essential components of this transition, guiding and supporting the rational, well-argued improvement of industries and public policies towards this convergence. In this respect, life cycle assessment (LCA) is the most appropriate environmental quantification method, because it is the most comprehensive: it accounts for the impacts of a system at all stages of its life cycle, and addresses these impacts in a multi-criteria manner. Standardized at international, European and French levels, its robustness is constantly evolving, thanks to the work of an international community of dozens of researchers. It is the most effective way of informing environmental decision-making, by countering prejudices and reducing the biases associated with quantification models.

Originally developed for manufactured products, it has been applied to transport components – infrastructure, vehicles – since the 1990s. After three decades of developing LCA specifically for transport, most of the methodological challenges have been successfully met. However, it is still not systematically used in environmental decision-making. The next stage in the development of LCA should therefore be its massive integration into public and private decision-making. As one of the sectors with the greatest impact on the environment in France, the transport sector must be a priority for LCA in order to improve its balance sheet.

This article begins by reviewing existing environmental assessment procedures in the sector. It then details LCA in the transport sector: general assessment method, chronology of application to transport and operational deployment. It reviews the different phases of transport planning and production, and exemplifies the place of LCA in each of these phases. Before concluding, the article proposes recommendations for using LCA in the transport sector: at what levels should it be used and why, how...