🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the widespread lack of rigor in model construction, calibration, and integration within current ICT life cycle assessment (LCA) practices, which undermines result credibility. To tackle this issue, the work proposes four foundational trustworthiness criteria for ICT LCA—model provenance, clearly defined scope, end-to-end traceability, and obsolescence management—and introduces an open computational LCA framework grounded in these principles. The framework integrates dependency graph modeling, a versioned model repository, automated enforcement of completeness constraints, and a structured model taxonomy. It effectively uncovers common misuses and structural flaws in existing LCA studies, thereby offering a viable pathway toward transparent, reproducible, and sustainably evolvable assessments of ICT environmental impacts.
📝 Abstract
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used to quantify and regulate the environmental impacts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems. Since direct biosphere measurements are complicated to perform, we claim that the environmental impact assessment of ICT relies heavily on models. In this paper, we first revisit the fundamentals of LCA: we emphasize that ICT LCAs effectively form systems of models, and we argue that such systems require an extra-high level of carefulness in construction, calibration, integration, and interpretation. We then document how this level of rigor is challenging to achieve with current practices. This is illustrated with emblematic examples of model misuse and an analysis of structural challenges related to database choice, scope mismatches, opaque aggregation, and model integration. From this analysis, we derive four key requirements for credible ICT LCA: explicit model lineage, clearly defined model scope, end-to-end traceability, and managed non-obsolescence. Finally, we propose a framework that operationalizes these requirements using explicit dependency graphs, an open and versioned LCA-oriented model repository, automatic enforcement of integrity constraints, and a well-defined model taxonomy.