2.2.4. LC impact and eco-efficiency assessment
Impact assessment is the third stage of LCA. Because there is still
no consensus on weighting, impact assessment was focused on
characterisation, as suggested by Blengini and Busto (2009). Theselected indicators include resource-use indicators: energy use
(EU), freshwater use (WU) and land use (LU); they also include
environmental impact (mid-point) indicators: eutrophication (EP),
acidification (AP), global warming potential (GWP100), freshwater
aquatic ecotoxicity (FWAE), ozone depletion (ODP). These impact
categories were chosen based upon their widespread use in agricultural
LCA studies, allowing for comparison. More specifically,
FWAE was selected because freshwater is a key feature and
compartment of paddy rice cropping systems. Characterisationwas
performed with the SimaPro platform using CML baseline 2000/
world, 1995 methodology.