Covering biodiversity-related impacts in life cycle impact assessment?

The Imperial Network of Excellence in Sustainability through Life Cycle Approaches will host Prof Francesca Verones, who will deliver a talk on biodiversity in life cycle assessment.

Abstract:

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely use approach for quantifying environmental impacts. LCA assesses impacts in three so called “areas of protection”, namely human health, ecosystem quality and natural resources. “Ecosystem quality” is all about impacts on “biodiversity”. In most cases this means, however, a focus on species richness only. In the last years there has been a big increase in the number and accuracy of models dealing with impacts on species richness and other indicators, such as functional diversity and mean species abundance have become integrated in some LCIA models. This talk will give a short insight into how LCA currently addresses biodiversity and which gaps remain to be filled.

Bio:

Francesca Verones is professor in the Industrial Ecology Programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She specializes in the development of novel impacts assessment methods, mostly with a focus on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Francesca has obtained her PhD from ETH Zürich in Switzerland, a Postdoc from the Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands and is at NTNU since 2014. She has been awarded an ERC starting grant for working on impacts on marine ecosystems form plastic pollution and invasive species and she has in 2019 received the Laudise Medal of the International Society for Industrial Ecology for her outstanding achievements in industrial ecology by a researcher under the age of 36.

Information for attendance

Registration is required. Register your interest in attending this seminar. The seminar will be hosted on Microsoft Teams and the link will be emailed to all registered attendees.