Environmental impacts of the domestic production and consumption of EU and EU countries

Towards assessing the environmental impacts of domestic production and consumption activities, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (EC-JRC) developed the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based Domestic Footprint indicator (Sanye Mengual et al., 2022). The goal of this indicator is to monitor the environmental impacts of EU and Member States domestic activities along time and the efforts of EU Member States to their domestic environmental impacts from economic growth. The Domestic Footprint assesses the environmental impacts of the domestic activities (production and consumption) at EU and at Member States level, including embodied impacts due to trade (consumption perspective) including the 16 impacts of the Environmental Footprint method (EC, 2021) (e.g. climate change, ecotoxicity, land use related impacts, water use related impacts, etc.). Furthermore, the environmental impacts of domestic activities can be assessed against the Planetary Boundaries (PBs) towards identifying the current situation in relation to the ecological limits of our planet.

The model may serve policy-makers for three main aspects that can support the analysis of both existing and future policies:

• Monitoring of policies along time, including analyses from different perspectives (e.g., decoupling)
• Identification of hotspots at different levels (e.g., impact category, environmental emission)
• Analysis of policy and green transition scenarios

The Domestic Footprint is a set of 16 LCA-based indicators, aimed at quantifying the environmental impacts of domestic production and consumption activities within the EU territory (Sanye Mengual & Sala, 2023). The Domestic Footprint aims at assessing the environmental impacts associated to emissions and resource extraction occurring within a Member State boundary (or the whole EU boundary) by adopting a production- and territorial-based perspective. Therefore, it accounts for both production and consumption activities taking place within the Member State’s domestic territory, e.g., from economic sectors such as industry, agriculture, energy, mining, and services; and also encompasses those impacts from households and government’s activities (e.g., transport, heating). The geographical scope of the Domestic Footprint is both the EU and Member States level.

The Domestic Footprint implements the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, which entails four main steps:

1. Definition of goal and scope. This step includes the overall design of the study, e.g. the definition of the specific objectives of the study, the description of the modelling assumptions, the identification of the intended audience etc.
2. Definition of the life cycle inventory (LCI). In this step, data on inputs, i.e. resources, and outputs, i.e. emissions in the environmental compartments (air, water, soil), entering and leaving the system under study should be collected.
3. Assessment of the environmental impacts. In this step, the environmental impacts due to resources use and emissions reported in the inventory are calculated through the use of impact models. Sixteen indicators referred to different impacts are considered, such as climate change, eutrophication of water bodies, use of fossil, mineral and metal resources. Furthermore, endpoint assessment models can be applied to assess effects of these 16 impacts on 3 areas of protection, i.e. human health, ecosystem health, and natural resources. These 16 indicators may be normalised by global impacts and weighted to be summarised in one “single score” indicator. Compared to the 16 indicators, the single score indicator has the advantage of being more effective for communication and for supporting the selection of alternatives, but at the same time “hides” part of the complexity of the different environmental impacts, and introduce a subjective element, i.e. weighting, which may affect the results.
4. Interpretation of the results. This step is aimed at fulfilling the goal and scope of the study. Typical questions which may be answered at this stage are “which are the most impacting stages of the supply chain?”, “which are the effects on the environment of a certain policy?”. LCA results are characterised by different sources of uncertainty which should be considered in the interpretation of the results. The definition of the life cycle inventory is subject to the availability of average information describing the system. In addition, impact assessment models are characterised by uncertainties, which to different extent influence the robustness of the 16 indicators

The Domestic Footprint is a comprehensive collection of data on resource use (e.g., minerals and metals, energy carriers, land use, water use) and emissions to air (e.g., greenhouse gases, particulate matter), water (e.g., nitrogen, phosphorous) and soil (e.g., heavy metals, pesticides) taking place in the territory complemented by emission estimates based on modelling. This collection results in a Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) and includes an exhaustive list of environmental pressures resulting from domestic activities. Environmental pressures are then translated into environmental impacts through the implementation of the Environmental Footprint 3.1 (EF reference package 3.1) method in the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) stage. The EF 3.1 method includes 16 impact categories, which can be normalized and weighted for their aggregation into a single weighted score. Normalization Factors (NFs) correspond to the EF global NFs, while Weighting Factors (WFs) of the EF weighting set are employed in this study. Finally, the assessment against PBs as absolute ecological thresholds is performed by employing the LCIA-based PBs developed for the EF framework.

The Domestic Footprint is based on the combination of:

1. the emissions to air, soil and water as well as the resources used in the territory;
2. the Environmental Footprint (EF) impact assessment method, which translates emissions and resource consumption into potential environmental impacts.

The Domestic Footprint results from aggregating the environmental impacts of resource use and emissions to the environment in the territory. Resource use and emissions (life cycle inventory) are based either on statistics or on modelling.