Environmental Impact Assessment In Urban Territory Based On LCA

City consists of industry subsystem, agriculture subsystem, building subsystem, transport subsystem and so on. The urbanization process of China has accelerated in recent ten years, which has brought a great pressure to environmental carrying capacity, and the "Five-Year Plans" carried out by Chinese government have intensified the efforts on environmental protection. Therefore, it is important to quantify the environmental impact and changing trend of all subsystems, and effectively allocate money to solve target urban environmental problems accordingly. The aim of our study is to adapt the existing life cycle assessment (LCA) method in regional environmental impact assessment to apply in urban territories, and apply the adapted method to Dalian.Main topics covered in this paper include:(1) An urban environmental impact assessment method was established by coupling with LCA. The existing LCA method in regional environmental impact assessment was adapted in terms of the selection of functional unit, land use functions analysis, the determination of inventory items and system modeling, to promote the role of regional characteristic and make results more accurate.(2) Apply the adapted method to Dalian and use 12 impact categories like climate change (CC) in ReCiPe method to assess the environmental impacts of Dalian in 2000,2005,2010 and 2012. The results showed that the environmental impact of Dalian increased over time, while the increasing speed decreased gradually. The environmental impact of food subsystem decreased over time, while other subsystems had a rapid growth, especially industry subsystem and building subsystem. The industry subsystem was the main contributor of environmental impact and accounted for approximately 80% of the total impact each year. At the same time, tourism and aquatic products also played an important role in environment, society and economy of Dalian. According to the results, decision makers can identify the subsystem that is the main contributor of target environmental problem, and improve accordingly.(3) Emphatically analyze industry subsystem which is the main contributor of environmental impacts of Dalian with comprehensive analysis of environment and economy. For the impact categories particulate matter formation (PMF), photochemical oxidant formation (POF) and terrestrial acidification (TA), the environmental cost of unit economic growth was reduced as time changes, and the improvement of environmental benefit was obvious. For other 9 impact categories, the improvement of environmental benefit was obvious from 2000 to 2010, while the environmental cost of unit economic growth was increased from 2010 to 2012. In addition, among 12 impact categories, the industry subsystem had the most influence on human toxicity (HT).The paper adapted existing LCA method in regional environmental impact assessment to apply in urban territories, and quantified the environmental impact and changing trend of all subsystems with a life cycle perspective, which could provide accurate technical support for urban environmental management and decision-making.