Economic assessment of the environmental impacts of land use through the life cycle assessment approach: state of art

Abstract

In the last decades, the Metropolitan Area of Mendoza has been the setting of a significant demographic expansion involving fertile or natural soils without considering the opportunity cost of urbanising and sealing soils. For this reason, the Territorial Ordinance Provincial Plan was developed, highlighting the need for a territorial planning that mitigates the risks of natural disasters, improves accessibility and economic and energy development. However, the plan does not take in to account the environmental impacts of this urbanisation in terms of economic and social costs and benefits, that is, how these transformations affect society as a whole. Hence the need to carry out a review of the literature in order to find out how similar situations have been analysed in other studies and to know if there are any methodologies that can be applied in the proposed case study. The review was carried out according to key words and it focused on 3 dimensions: Life Cycle Assessment, Territorial Planning, and Economic Valuation covering the period 2004-2018. As a result of this investigation, some studies were detected that can form the basis upon which an analysis methodology can be developed.

Keywords:
Economic assessment; Land use; Life cycle assessment