Operationalising territorial life cycle inventory through the development of territorial emission factor for European agricultural land use

The territorial life cycle assessment (tLCA) framework was recently developed to support land-use planning at the territorial scale. However, it still faces challenges in terms of its application. This research responds to the need for integrating a geographical information system (GIS) tool into the tLCA framework, which has not yet been operationalised in the framework. This article aims to contribute to harmonising the link between tLCA and GIS at the inventory phase. In specific, we propose to introduce the concept of territorial Emission Factor (tEF) in the inventory phase of the current tLCA framework so that emissions can be calculated directly from land-use planning, which can be expressed as spatial data using GIS. A case study of maize land use in the Walloon region (South region in Belgium) is implemented to prove the concept for agricultural territories. Besides the benefit of linking GIS in tLCA, the results show that tEF can serve as an informative indicator, revealing territorial differences and identify hotspots in input inventory. The case study calculates tEF at the subnational level using open-access data, which shows one possibility to discriminate tEF for European countries. The data selection for the case study is mainly based on an analysis of the methods and data sources used in the existing life cycle inventory databases for the agricultural sector. This practice contributes to increasing transparency and comparability of the results. It reveals a possibility to fill the data gap with existing open-access data when the inventory for the agricultural territory at subnational is not available. In sum, this study 1) develops the concept of tEF to facilitate tLCA operationalisation with GIS 2) conducts a case study to demonstrate the utilisation of tEF in tLCA, and 3) explores the possibility of discriminating tEF over European countries for agricultural sector through open-access data. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.