Land use in Exiobase 3.4

Question

Hi,

I am trying to calculate the land use with the exiobase 3.4 database.
When analyzing the results, land use is always 0.
When I check the data sets, the individual data sets only contain monetary flows as inputs and only emissions as outputs (aside from the monetary output of the sector). No flows referring to land use. Only very few datasets contain land use, most others do not. Still, even these datasets result in a land use of 0.

How can "Dairy products - DE" not result in any land use? The LCI of this data set does not contain any land use in the LCA
Another example: the data set "cereal grains nec - DE" contains the use of cropland (Cropland - Cereal grains nec - 8.291283 m2). However, when I analyze the data set, the resulting land use is 0.

The table of characterization factors for "EXIOBASE - Other impacts " -> Land use is empty!

The key questions arising thereof are:
1) Why do most datasets not contain any land use?
2) Why does the LCIA method "land use" (EXIOBASE - Other impacts) not contain any characterization factors for land use?

According to https://nexus.openlca.org/ws/files/14791, the LCIA methods that are implemented should work. Land use is contained in the LCIA category "EXIOBASE - Other impacts".

I tried both databases: "exiobase3_monetary_20181212" and "exiobase3_monetary_20181212_fixedlcia_june2021".

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

You are right, reason seems that the land use impact category in th exiobase method  ("other impacts") is empty - we'll check.

Edit, July 30: we had indeed in the "other inputs" LCIA method from exiobase no land use added, reason was that the methods are released for an earlier version of exiobase where the flows are different from the flows in the 3.4 version. We have now released a new version of the database, version 4, in Nexus, and have made a very simply land use category, similar to the modeling in the old exiobase database (2.2, I think):

This is of course not really sophisticated but gives an estimate of the land use. We also added some other previously empty categories in the "other inputs".

Because the database is quite large, we have also exported the "other inputs" method as JSON-LD file and added it to the documents section in Nexus:

this can be imported into openLCA with a previous exiobase, when you specify "overwrite previous versions"

We hope this is useful!

Andreas