A combined territorial life cycle assessment and ecosystem services valuation to analyse the environmental performance of coastal planning scenarios: Insights from a case study in southern France

A territory, which is a geographical area qualified by a legal affiliation or by a natural or cultural feature, presents an appropriate scale for establishing responsibilities and initiating sustainable development actions. At the same time, globalization implies constant interaction of territories with the rest of the world. The management of territorial projects therefore requires a revised set of environmental assessment tools that consider local and global issues with a multi-scale perspective. The environmental benefits of land use policies can, however, remain hidden behind global approaches such as life cycle assessment (LCA), which are generally product-oriented and tend to ignore ecosystem services (ES). This paper aims to propose new decision-making tools for land use planning based on the joint use of ecosystem services assessment (ESA) and territorial Life Cycle Assessment (T-LCA). Within the T-LCA framework, two main types of indicators were quantified. On the one hand, the services provided by land planning scenarios were computed by the ESA by considering provisioning, cultural and regulation ES. On the other hand, environmental impacts were characterized using the Impact World+ Life Cycle Impacts Assessment (LCIA) method. Two contrasting scenarios and a business as usual scenario (BAU) were studied and compared as a proof of concept. Scenario 1 focused on productive economy by maintaining and diversifying the shellfish farming sector, which is a strong component of the area's social identity. Scenario 2 favoured the development of tourism. Overall, the results indicated that environmental damages varied only slightly between scenarios, with tourism activities (i.e., transport and accommodation) emerging as the primary contributors. In contrast, there were very different profiles in terms of socio-economic benefits depending on the scenario. Provisioning ES were very high in scenario 1, while scenario 2 led to a clear increase in cultural ES. This research emphasizes the importance of developing integrated assessment approaches when creating local planning policies, in order to identify potential trade-offs between environmental impacts and benefits, and local and global issues.