Coupling optimization with territorial LCA to support agricultural land-use planning

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Sustainability Science
• Spatial Planning

Background:

• Land-use planning involves complex trade-offs between environmental impacts and societal demands.
• Traditional methods for evaluating land-use scenarios are often iterative and time-consuming.
• Assessing environmental services and impacts at a territorial level requires integrated methodologies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an automated approach for generating optimal land-use planning scenarios.
• To integrate territorial life cycle assessment (LCA) with multi-objective optimization (MOO) and Geographical Information System (GIS).
• To minimize environmental damages while maximizing land-use function satisfaction for bioenergy production.

Main Methods:

• Adaptation of the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to the territorial level (territorial LCA).
• Application of a fuzzy multi-objective optimization (MOO) approach to handle trade-offs and generate optimized scenarios.
• Utilization of Geographical Information System (GIS) for spatial data manipulation and assessment.

Main Results:

• The integrated method successfully generated optimal land-use planning scenarios for bioenergy production.
• Identified competition for land uses and trade-offs among environmental impact categories.
• Highlighted potential cross-territorial impacts of optimized land-use planning.

Conclusions:

• The developed integrated tool (territorial LCA, MOO, GIS) can assist policymakers in optimizing land use for bio-based products.
• The approach provides insights into optimal crop locations and energy utilization pathways.
• Future work could incorporate life cycle sustainability assessment and farmer behavior for enhanced real-world applicability.