Climate change is envisaged as the single most serious threat to the existence of life on the earth. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission from human activities such as fossil fuel combustion for obtaining energies is the main cause of climate change. Mitigation and adaptation initiatives are underway; however, the outcomes of those initiatives are not tangible. This may partly be due to inaccurate estimation of the actual GHG emissions from the sources. A famous maxim, “without measurement, no management”, calls for a robust and accurate quantification of GHG emissions for implementing those initiatives. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the tool of choice for the quantification of GHG emissions. Claiming “avoided emissions” is common practice in industry sectors including renewable energy, information and communication technologies (ICT), and innovative technologies substituting conventional technologies. Uncertainty around the input and output data for LCA, and life cycle impact assessment results such as GHG emissions, needs to be addressed for proper implementation of LCA. In particular, the uncertainty of emission factors of many types of energies and materials is a main obstacle to the accurate accounting of GHG emissions. This Special Issue seeks contributions from researchers, industry experts, and academia to the topics addressed above. We therefore invite papers on methodologies, case studies, and reviews, contributing to the advancement of the quantification of GHG emissions and other environmental impacts in the context of LCA.
Keywords: LCA methodologies related to avoided emissions; Application of the avoided emissions methods to renewable energy, ICT, and innovative technology sectors; Uncertainty analysis methodologies; Application of the uncertainty analysis methods to LCA; Data quality assessment related to the input/output data, including LCI databases; Quantification of GHG emissions of the industrial products and services such as rental, lease, and servicizing; Determination of the GHG emission factors for materials and energies (e.g., electricity, fuels, plastics).