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Water Use

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Life Cycle Impact Assessment

Abstract

Water use impacts have two different dimensions: pollution (degradative use) and consumption (consumptive use). Degradative use is mainly tackled by impact assessment of pollutant emissions. This chapter focuses on water deprivation due to consumption. The impacts considered here address the case of ecosystems and human users being deprived of water, but also the depletion of stock resources, potentially depriving future users of water.

The short-term water cycle is dominated by evaporation from sea, precipitation on land and runoff in rivers. Groundwater and lakes play a longer-term role but are crucial for the assessment of effects of water use competition. While the global water cycle is not heavily influenced by human activities, the impacts can be significant in specific regions, and therefore regional water cycles are relevant. The temporal variability of the hydrological processes is also important for considerations of water use effects on environment.

The existing methods consider the main features of the hydrological cycle but still many improvements in the global, regionalised data are required for proper integration of relevant aspects in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) of water use. Moreover, the available life cycle inventories have generally low data quality for the relevant flows for most processes and often lack global coverage.

The impact assessment methods can be grouped into four main categories: water scarcity as midpoint, impacts on human health, impacts on ecosystem quality, and resource depletion. They cover a variety of impact pathways, while still many important issues such as in-stream use of dams are currently missing.

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Acknowledgement

This chapter is partially based on the report on water use impact assessment methods delivered in the PROSUITE project (Funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme). I appreciate helpful comments by Mark Huijbregts and provision of graphical material by Anna Kounina, as well as input on resource depletion by Pilar Swart, Rodrigo A. F. Alvarenga and Jo Dewulf. Language editing was done by Catherine Raptis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Environmental Engineering (IfU), ETH Zurich, HPZ E 33, John-von-Neumann-Weg 9, Zurich, CH-8093, Switzerland

    Stephan Pfister

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  1. Stephan Pfister
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Correspondence to Stephan Pfister .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Denmark

    Michael Z. Hauschild

  2. Department of Environmental Science, Institute for Water and Wetland Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Mark A.J. Huijbregts

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Pfister, S. (2015). Water Use. In: Hauschild, M., Huijbregts, M. (eds) Life Cycle Impact Assessment. LCA Compendium – The Complete World of Life Cycle Assessment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9744-3_12

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