Delval et al. (2026): Guidance on integrating marine environmental impacts of ocean alkalinity enhancement into life cycle assessment

Mona H. Delval, Patrik J. G. Henriksson, Paul Behrens, Laura Scherer, Pablo Trucco-Pignata, Patricia Grasse, Phil Renforth and Nils Thonemann, IN: The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-026-02707-z

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) is considered a promising marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) option and may contribute to climate change mitigation. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to assess OAE environmentally but faces limitations in capturing marine impacts. Improving the assessment of OAE in LCA requires a detailed understanding of its marine environment impact pathways to develop sub-compartmentalised and regionalised characterisation factors (CFs). The authors demonstrate how such pathways can be identified.
The authors build on Woods et al. (2021), who propose a qualitative framework to identify key components of impact pathways, and Richter et al. (2024), who provide guidance on framework development in a multidisciplinary context. The authors develop a methodological approach that allows to qualitatively identify the marine environmental impact pathways of OAE and determine which components are integrated in LCIA models or missing, as an initial phase toward developing CFs for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA).

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