| Most of the time, the increase in human activities harms the environment. Due to the capacity limit of the Earth to bear such impacts and considering the growth of world population and its demands, there is a need to manage the future growth of human society in order to mitigate its impacts on the environment. Life cycle assessment (LCA) seems to be a great methodology for this purpose because it assesses different types of environmental impacts of a product or service based on all of its life cycle stages. However, it appears that LCA is not adapted to the evaluation of large-scale international policies required for some environmental issues. Especially, current LCA methodology fails to properly model indirect consequences on the environment of a major change within the energy sector in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. To model these indirect consequences on the environment, global economy modeling is required as a major change in the energy sector is expected to affect the rest of the economy and therefore to cause indirect environmental impacts. This is the goal of this university thesis: Develop a new decision tool "macroscopic life cycle assessment" using the LCA methodology and the GTAP macroeconomic model in order to assess environmental impacts caused by significant changes in human society. Application of macroscopic LCA to two different European energy policies for the 2005-2025 period shows its ability to model some rebound effects and to compare environmental benefits obtained from a bioenergy policy versus environmental impacts caused by the economic growth during 2005-2025. Additionally, the method allows to identify regions where and time periods when environmental impacts are expected to occur. Macroscopic LCA has important application opportunities for LCA: while the methodology is usually used to study the environmental profile of a product or service, it now becomes possible to evaluate environmental consequences of a decision affecting many products and services. Moreover, thanks to recent developments in social LCA and due to its capacity to model economic and environmental impacts, the macroscopic LCA will eventually become not only an environmental evaluation tool but a sustainable evaluation tool as well. |
