There is growing demand for evidence-based policy and decision-making to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and land degradation and biodiversity loss. Regulations, trade mechanisms, procurement frameworks and corporate reporting initiatives increasingly rely on environmental information at product level. To support decisions that favour lower-impact products and value chains, policymakers, companies and other stakeholders need policy-grade environmental data that are comparable, traceable and quality-assured.
Yet, the current life cycle assessment (LCA) ecosystem remains fragmented. Background databases vary in quality and assumptions, access conditions are often restrictive, assurance approaches and update cycles are inconsistent, and a lack of interoperability makes it difficult to use different resources together at scale.
The Life Cycle Initiative sees this as a critical bottleneck and envisions a shared global space for life-cycle action through the Global LCA Atlas (also known as the Global LCA Platform).
The Global LCA Atlas is not just another project: it is the missing global infrastructure for product-level environmental evidence.
Contribute to the initiation phase of the Global LCA Atlas!
The Global LCA Atlas is preparing for a 12-month initiation phase that will build and validate the institutional, technical and financial foundations required for its longer-term operation. The initiation phase focuses on four foundational areas: governance and institution; database and access; data alignment, generation and quality assurance; and the financial model and transition funding.
The Global LCA Asset Review is a study under Working Group 2 of the ATLAS, bringing information on existing LCA resources together to inform subsequent work. A continuously updated working draft is available at https://global-lca-asset.vercel.app/. It is not final or exhaustive and does not rank or certify the resources listed.
We invite all the LCA practitioners to review areas they know well and contribute comments, corrections or additional information. Please find “Comment and Feedback” on the website, identifying the relevant asset or page and providing supporting sources. The underlying data and documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/jianchuanqi/global-lca-asset.
It is a UNEP anchored initiative designed to create a trusted, verifiable, interoperable backbone for environmental life cycle inventory (LCI) data, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods, and the supporting models, tools, and guidance needed to apply LCA consistently at scale, while maintaining the relevance of existing resources. A supporting digital platform will enable access and interoperability rather than serving as a centralized infrastructure to ensure that decision-grade LCA and footprint studies can be made accessible to all nations and stakeholders.
An AI-generated illustration of the Global LCA Atlas.
We are currently holding bilateral conversations with funders, implementation partners, supporters and contributors, policymakers and advisory organizations interested in contributing to make the Global LCA Atlas a reality. Please get in touch with Llorenç Milà i Canals if you can provide funding, LCA datasets, technical expertise and delivery capacity, data review and quality-assurance expertise, user testing, regional engagement and other in-kind support.
Webinar: Mobilizing efforts towards a Global LCA Platform (now Atlas)
Watch this webinar to understand why interoperable background data matters for policy-grade product evidence, as voiced by governments of various countries and the LCA service industry.