About 50 percent of earth's land area is used by mankind. Every day 5, 000 to 15, 000 ha of natural area is sealed worldwide for human purposes. Land use is increasingly becoming not only a scientific but also a political and societal discussion. To cover all relevant environmental impacts of a product or process, land use aspects have to be integrated into methods like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
In this publication country and land use type specific characterization factors are presented for the land use impact categories Erosion Resistance, Mechanical Filtration, Physicochemical Filtration, Groundwater Regeneration, and Biotic Production. All factors are calculated for the land use related flows of the ELCD - European reference Life-Cycle Database based on globally available spatial data. For the calculation of the impact categories, the LANCA method published in 2010 was refined and new background data is used.
The authors have been working on the integration of land use aspects into LCA for several years and contribute to international working groups as well as specific projects on this topic. All of them have been involved in the development of the LANCA tool and in the conduction of respective case studies.