Marine Ecosystems: working towards their coverage within life cycle impact assessment

It is often said that we know less about our oceans than we do of space. As a consequence, we know surprisingly little about the largest ecosystems on Earth. At the same time, these ecosystems provide 15% of the world population with proteins, are responsible for millions of jobs and a very important reservoir for CO2. However, so far we have cared little about quantifying the impacts of humankind on marine ecosystems, despite their importance. In fact, no marine ecosystem exists that is not impacted by anthropogenic activities. This is something that should cause us to pause and think: an ecosystem so vast it always appeared too large to be affected by us, yet every single part of it suffers from at least one anthropogenic driver of change. These changes range from habitat loss, to overexploitation of ecosystems, to impacts from climate change, invasive species, noise, toxic emissions and waste, to name a few. Yet today we have no means of quantifying the damage of these pressures in marine ecosystems in a system wide approach. There is large potential to assess these damages within life cycle assessment (LCA), a widely used tool for quantifying environmental impacts, but traditional methods have never been properly developed for marine systems. It is therefore my aim to contribute to closing this substantial research gap. To do so, I will develop novel models of relevant environmental mechanisms to quantify the ecosystem damage of pressures within an LCA framework. I will develop models based on impacts on species richness and, additionally, marine ecosystem services. This is a paradshift and substantial advancement, since ecosystem services are so far not included in the framework of LCA. All models will be tested in individual and at least one overarching case study. Furthermore, the developed models can serve to quantify ecosystem impacts in other types of sustainability assessment, such as multiregional input-output (MRIO) models.