Towards consequential life cycle assessment in bioeconomy: Market dynamics in wood and food sectors (BIOMAD)

The Finnish bioeconomy strategy implies that non-renewable, fossil-intensive materials and energy carriers will be substituted with biobased alternatives to support climate change mitigation and enable a just socio-economic transition. Indeed, comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) studies indicate that biobased products have a lower fossil footprint compared to most competing products. Such comparisons are based on bookkeeping of unit processes and embodied emissions through attributional LCA (ALCA). Assessing the system-level environmental impact of changes in biobased products’ supply requires understanding value chains and quantifying market dynamics. For example, introducing a less environmentally harmful product on the market may increase its consumption if it is cheaper (rebound effect), the upstream supplier impacts can exceed the direct impacts (multiplier effect), or limiting resource use in one part of the economy may shift its use elsewhere (leakage effect). Thus, the net impact of an expanding bioeconomy remains critically uncertain. This calls for consequential LCA (CLCA) approaches. CLCA represents the convergence of LCA and economic modeling by expanding the system boundaries to consider all affected products when the demand for one product changes. In other words, it describes a modelling approach that seeks to describe the overall environmental consequences of a decision. The main aim of BIOMAD is to implement a novel CLCA framework to quantify the environmental impact of changes in the markets of selected biobased products. This is achieved through combining three disciplines: environmental sustainability assessment, market research, and environmental economics. Understanding the true system-level impacts of new foods and bio-based materials can help design new policy instruments that pave way for sustainable business models and sustainable consumption.

The project involves estimating price elasticities from statistical data to judge the existence and rate of substitution between selected products on the market and modelling the consequences of indirect market effects with an LCA software package. The duties of the Doctoral Researcher include also completing postgraduate studies, as well as teaching and student supervision for up to 5 % of the annual working time.