Aims and motivation

Aims

This task force will update and expand the working summary of public/national LCI databases (produced during the definition study), to include all LCI databases relevant to the LCA community. The results will be used to create a web-based, UNEP LCI Database Registry, which will provide basic meta-data on the databases and web links to the appropriate sites.

Motivation

A growing number of nations are investing resources in projects to make LCI data publicly available. These databases are as of yet poorly networked, if at all. At the same time, a growing number of industry associations and private sector interests have invested in developing LCI databases, which they make available for wider use to differing degrees and with a variety of levels of restriction or qualification. A growing number of researchers are developing process LCI databases, while others develop Input/Output-based LCI databases; some are for sale while others are (at least in principle) freely available for use by others. Finally, LCA software providers continue to expand and update the proprietary databases which are bundled in their software.

This growing wealth of data resources has not yet been comprehensively surveyed. Some LCA researchers are familiar with significant subsets of the available databases, but this knowledge tends to be focused on an industrial or geographic or methodological subset of the whole. The same is true of the few, highly valuable, efforts to develop web-based portals to LCA data. The world LCA community needs a comprehensive summary of available databases. It further needs for such a summary to be self-updating, since the world of LCI data continues to evolve and to grow.