Ecosystem goods and services (EGSs) are of crucial importance for the economic and social
development of human communities. The well-established life cycle assessment (LCA) method
is facing a number of challenging improvements to define new Characterization factors
(CFs) for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) of EGSs. Very recently, extensive work
conducted under the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle initiative has been completed with the goal of
providing new LCIA methods and spatially differentiated mid-point CFs for land use and
land use change impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the implemented
models do not enable one to assess the actual damage to ecosystem functionality, and thus
the relationship among EGSs and related areas of protection (e.g. AoP of “Natural
Resources”) remains undefined. This paper aims at investigating the potential
characterization ability of the Emergy method for LCIA of EGSs. The goal is to use the
extensive libraries of Unit Emergy Values (UEVs) of primary services and resources as CFs
for LCIA to evaluate the physical contribution of EGSs in supporting life cycle processes.
Having its roots in thermodynamics and systems ecology, Emergy can appraise a larger and
more diversified (than LCA) number of EGSs through a common physical denominator, i.e. the
solar emjoule or seJ, which measures the solar energy embodied in natural products. Emergy
thus has a typical Nature-oriented perspective, accounting for the available energy that
is used up by the natural cycles, directly and indirectly, to generate biotic and abiotic
resources. A library of selected UEVs (more than 100) for biophysical EGS valuation has
been framed including values collected from the Emergy literature and formulated on the
latest planetary baseline (i.e. 15.2E + 24 seJ/yr). Advantages and limitations for future
application of these values toward an LCIA mid-point impact characterization of Emergy are
discussed. UEVs may represent mid-point LCIA factors for ecological contribution analysis,
enabling one to account for the memory of energy previously required to produce EGSs,
which can be used as a proxy to assess the future environmental work necessary to
regenerate the used EGSs. However, the added value of Emergy for LCA is still debated,
mainly because of the low accuracy and unclear meaning of the UEVs in relation to the
availability of resources. Therefore, Emergy can be conceived as a suitable physical
measure complementary to the economic valuations and current “user-side” tools applied in
LCA.