Application of Life Cycle Assessment to hydraulic infrastructure: feedback from two regional spatial planning companies

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used as an environmental assessment method at different stages of a hydraulic infrastructure project: in the preliminary studies to compare variants and in the detailed design phase to ecodesign the structures. LCA complements the impact analysis with a broader perspective, complementing environmental assessments, regulatory impact studies and fauna and flora inventories.
Two regional spatial planning companies specializing in the design, construction and management of large hydraulic structures have shared their approach to this method. One of the barriers to applying LCA is the need for specific expertise, which prevents some companies from having the internal resources to carry out LCA. Another difficulty is the imprecision of emission factor databases, which makes it difficult to model all desired developments. However, this issue is beginning to be addressed with the widespread use of FDES (Environmental and Health Declaration Sheets) by suppliers, which are based on LCAs and provide information on the emissions of a product (e.g. a pipeline).
In the future, the prospects for the use of LCA are promising, as it can be a lever for the transition to a low-carbon strategy: identifying a company's key impacts through LCA helps to target areas for action. For water infrastructure developers, efforts should focus on the production methods of raw materials and on optimising energy use in the operational phase, such as water distribution. Finally, in the near future, territorial LCA could assess the opportunities and modalities of development to identify the services provided to the territory by different development options.