10 years with iLUC research

September 30, 2017 by Jannick Schmidt

This year we celebrate more than 10 years of focussed research on Land Use Change (LUC) and indirect Land Use Change (iLUC). We do this with a free webinar on iLUC modelling for up to 100 people on November 15th.

Our first publications that included land use effect were about rapeseed and palm oil, and were part of my Ph.D. thesis: Life cycle assessment of rapeseed oil and palm oil from 2007. Ten years later, we are still developing the models and improving the framework for modelling indirect land use changes in life cycle assessment (eg. Schmidt et al. 2015; De Rosa et al. 2017).

Our own efforts have been largely channelled through the iLUC initiative, aka the iLUC Club. We began this project in 2011 and today the iLUC initiative has more than 20 universities and companies as members. We are grateful for their continued support to this important work on towards consistent methodology and modelling of iLUC in life cycle assessment.

We still have a few places for the webinar if you are interested:

References

De Rosa M, Odgaard M V, Staunstrup J K, Knudsen M T, Hermansen J E (2017). Identifying Land Use and Land-Use Changes (LULUC): A Global LULUC Matrix. Environ. Sci. Technol. 51(14):7954–7962 http://lca-net.com/p/2735

Schmidt J H, Weidema B P, Brandão M (2015). A framework for modelling indirect land use changes in life cycle assessment. Journal of Cleaner Production 99:230‑238 http://lca-net.com/p/1863