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Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts
In response to growing awareness of climate change, requests to establish product carbon footprints have been increasing. Product carbon footprints are life cycle assessments restricted to just one impact category, global warming. Product carbon footprint studies generate life cycle inventory result...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363321/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25781175 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121221 |
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author | Henriksson, Patrik J. G. Heijungs, Reinout Dao, Hai M. Phan, Lam T. de Snoo, Geert R. Guinée, Jeroen B. |
author_facet | Henriksson, Patrik J. G. Heijungs, Reinout Dao, Hai M. Phan, Lam T. de Snoo, Geert R. Guinée, Jeroen B. |
author_sort | Henriksson, Patrik J. G. |
collection | PubMed |
description | In response to growing awareness of climate change, requests to establish product carbon footprints have been increasing. Product carbon footprints are life cycle assessments restricted to just one impact category, global warming. Product carbon footprint studies generate life cycle inventory results, listing the environmental emissions of greenhouse gases from a product’s lifecycle, and characterize these by their global warming potentials, producing product carbon footprints that are commonly communicated as point values. In the present research we show that the uncertainties surrounding these point values necessitate more sophisticated ways of communicating product carbon footprints, using different sizes of catfish (Pangasius spp.) farms in Vietnam as a case study. As most product carbon footprint studies only have a comparative meaning, we used dependent sampling to produce relative results in order to increase the power for identifying environmentally superior products. We therefore argue that product carbon footprints, supported by quantitative uncertainty estimates, should be used to test hypotheses, rather than to provide point value estimates or plain confidence intervals of products’ environmental performance. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4363321 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-43633212015-03-23 Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts Henriksson, Patrik J. G. Heijungs, Reinout Dao, Hai M. Phan, Lam T. de Snoo, Geert R. Guinée, Jeroen B. PLoS One Research Article In response to growing awareness of climate change, requests to establish product carbon footprints have been increasing. Product carbon footprints are life cycle assessments restricted to just one impact category, global warming. Product carbon footprint studies generate life cycle inventory results, listing the environmental emissions of greenhouse gases from a product’s lifecycle, and characterize these by their global warming potentials, producing product carbon footprints that are commonly communicated as point values. In the present research we show that the uncertainties surrounding these point values necessitate more sophisticated ways of communicating product carbon footprints, using different sizes of catfish (Pangasius spp.) farms in Vietnam as a case study. As most product carbon footprint studies only have a comparative meaning, we used dependent sampling to produce relative results in order to increase the power for identifying environmentally superior products. We therefore argue that product carbon footprints, supported by quantitative uncertainty estimates, should be used to test hypotheses, rather than to provide point value estimates or plain confidence intervals of products’ environmental performance. Public Library of Science 2015-03-17 /pmc/articles/PMC4363321/ /pubmed/25781175 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121221 Text en © 2015 Henriksson et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Henriksson, Patrik J. G. Heijungs, Reinout Dao, Hai M. Phan, Lam T. de Snoo, Geert R. Guinée, Jeroen B. Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title | Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title_full | Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title_fullStr | Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title_full_unstemmed | Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title_short | Product Carbon Footprints and Their Uncertainties in Comparative Decision Contexts |
title_sort | product carbon footprints and their uncertainties in comparative decision contexts |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363321/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25781175 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121221 |
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