Prof Bernhard Steubing - Including broad future scenarios in prospective LCA

Prospective LCA is an important method to provide future-oriented environmental decision support. This talk aims at providing an overview of recent progress in developing and integrating broad future scenarios from IAMs and other data sources into prospective LCAs as well as some of the tools available for this purpose. Further, challenges will be outlined that should be addressed in order to pave the way for a more widespread use of prospective LCI data in future-oriented LCAs.

Speaker summary

Bernhard Steubing works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Ecology at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University. Bernhard specializes on the further development of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and related methods and applies these to answer sustainability-related questions in energy, electric mobility, the built environment, and other areas. Currently, he dedicates much effort to the advancement of data, methods, and open software for future-oriented, i.e. prospective (or ex-ante) LCA, to provide decision support for the transition to a more circular and sustainable economy. Bernhard has received his PhD from EPFL on the availability and optimal use of biomass for bioenergy, while working at Empa. During his PostDoc at ETH Zurich, he coordinated a project on the optimal environmental use of wood resources and was part of the ecoinvent expert group. He then also started the development of the open source LCA software Activity Browser. In 2015 Bernhard joined CML at Leiden University as a tenure-track assistant professor, however, first embarked on a year of sailing across the Atlantic. In 2022 Bernhard completed his tenure track.