Introducing the Antelope Quantity Database
In the international standards, Life cycle assessment (LCA) is described as having four iterative stages: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation.
For most clients, the hard work of life cycle assessment is all about the inventory stage because that's where they have to engage with their operations and suppliers.
Impact assessment (LCIA) often gets the least attention, often perceived as an "insider" question for LCA practitioners to deal with. LCA practitioners, for their part, often shrug off the LCIA challenge as a problem for the software makers.
And a problem it is, indeed. Partly as a consequence of the technical challenges, LCIA methods are the least innovative and the most outdated aspects of the LCA process. Impact assessment requires deep scientific rigor combined with subtle (and often thankless) problem solving. LCIA methods have to be rendered compatible with a world of different inventory data sources and reporting frameworks. Service providers (like ecoinvent) who would rather focus deeply on curating inventory data find themselves independently implementing LCIA, working to provide compatibility with every software maker who must *also* independently implement every method. Precisely because LCIA is low-profile, and wedged deep in the belly of every software platform, it cannot receive the attention it needs for innovation and improvement.
But LCIA doesn't need to be buried in the internal operations of LCA software. In fact, LCIA is a well-posed problem all by itself. At the heart of LCIA is a collection of statements about *flows*. Each statement has the same form:
A "flow",
made up of some substance or material (called a "flowable"),
measured in a reference quantity (such as mass),
enters (or leaves) an environmental compartment (called a "context"),
(possibly in a particluar region or location),
and has a characterized effect with respect to some analytic quantity of interest (called a "query quantity").
I call this the quantity relation and it is a relation among three types of things: flowables, contexts (regionally specific), and quantities.
I created qdb, the Antelope Quantity Database, to help LCA practitioners manage this information. Qdb is meant to be a self-standing solution to the LCIA problem, acting as a clearinghouse for flows and flowables, contexts, quantities, and the characterizations that relate them together.
Currently available as an early-alpha demo, the qdb web interface allows you to search for flowables and quantities and compare them side-by-side. In the future, it will have the ability to map flows from one data system to another and to perform LCIA on-the-fly, separating this thorny problem entirely from the problems of inventory data management and supply chain modeling.
There's a brief documentation written on the Antelope Guidebook website here, and you can watch this screen recording of the tool in action.
Please take a look, and get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions.
