Combining Life Cycle Assessment and planetary boundaries to assess the sustainability of products and activities

Our research and development work focuses on exploring new approaches, tailored to the needs of organisations and carried out in collaboration with public, private, and non-profit partners.

 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is now the benchmark method for evaluating the potential environmental and social impacts of a product, a company, or a territory. It considers the entire life cycle and applies a multi-criteria approach.

 

Coupling LCA with the planetary boundaries framework changes thenature of the assessment. It moves beyond comparing one product or system against another, and instead asks whether the impacts generated remain sustainable in light of planetary boundaries.

 

To date, LCA has been applied mainly at product level: it enables comparison between an alternative and an existing or competing equivalent. This relative approach is useful, but it does not account for volumes or absolute thresholds that must be respected. As a result, it cannot confirm whether a product or service is truly sustainable. And too often, the answer is no.

 

 

The concept of planetary boundaries

 

For around 10,000 years, during the Holocene, Earth experienced climatic and ecological stability that enabled human societies to thrive. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, human activities have exerted growing pressure on natural systems, with the risk of irreversible disruption.

 

Fossil fuels and intensive agriculture are among the main drivers. They can profoundly disrupt the regulatory systems on which the planet’s equilibrium depends – an equilibrium that the Holocene should have preserved for thousands more years.

 

In response, researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre proposed the planetary boundaries framework in 2009. It defines nine major ecological processes and the thresholds that must not be crossed if Earth is to remain in a safe operating space for humanity:

• climate change
• biodiversity loss
• disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles
• land-use change
• freshwater cycle
• introduction of novel entities into the biosphere
• ocean acidification
• depletion of the ozone layer
• increase in atmospheric aerosols

 

Of these processes, climate change and biodiversity loss are considered the most critical, as each alone could destabilise the Earth system.

 

Figure 1: change in average global temperature over the past 100,000 years (Source: Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity – Rockström et al., 2009)

 

Figure 2: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Based on Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2025, Richardson et al. 2023, Steffen et al. 2015, and Rockström et al. 2009

 

 

Today, seven of the nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed, the most recent being ocean acidification (September 2025).

 

Each boundary is associated with one or more control variables and a threshold value. Exceeding these thresholds can trigger abrupt system shifts, with severe consequences for humanity.

 

The planetary boundaries framework has now become a global compass for evaluating the sustainability of human activities.

 

It has also inspired other approaches, such as Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (2012), which adds a social dimension: ensuring a social foundation while respecting the ecological ceiling.

 

Figure 3: representation of the Doughnut – Raworth K., 2012

 

The aim is to remain within the Doughnut’s safe and just space for humanity – between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling set by planetary boundaries.

 

 

Coupling LCA and planetary boundaries in business

 

LCA evaluates impacts. Planetary boundaries define what Earth can sustain. Combining the two leads to Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment (AESA).

 

Two main approaches exist for AESA:

• Adapt LCA indicators to align directly with planetary boundaries and their units;
• Retain existing LCA indicators (such as those used in the European PEF) but set absolute thresholds that must not be exceeded, starting at global level and then downscaling to product, company, or sector level.

 

This downscaling requires allocation rules: what share of the global ecological budget can be assigned to a sector, an activity, or a product?

 

Since 2015, several hundred scientific publications have explored the issue of "downscaling" the planetary boundaries framework. In 2024, a global review summarised the state of research and highlighted the potential of LCA planetary boundaries to guide global governance and corporate strategy (Approaches to incorporate Planetary Boundaries in Life Cycle Assessment: A critical review – Paulillo et al 2024).

 

In short, this approach reframes sustainability assessment: no longer simply local or comparative, but within the collective framework of planetary boundaries. Integrating planetary boundaries into LCA also helps avoid overly narrow perspectives (e.g. focusing solely on climate) and ensures interconnected environmental challenges are addressed together.

 

 

Links with other approaches

 

LCA planetary boundaries can be combined with other methods and concepts:

• Organisational LCA: equivalent to a multi-criteria carbon footprint, which can be coupled with an AESA to evaluate the real sustainability of a company;
• Social LCA and the Doughnut: combining environmental and social assessments leads to a “Doughnut diagnosis”;
• Territorial LCA: as in the city of Grenoble’s “Doughnut Portrait”, territorial assessments can adopt an absolute approach;

 

Sufficiency and business models: rethinking the volume of physical flows and the sobriety of economic models is now essential to stay within limits.

 

 

Concrete examples

 

France example

In 2023, France’s carbon footprint stood at 644 MtCO₂e, or 9.4 tCO₂e per capita (including imports). According to Bjørn et al. (2015), the sustainable threshold is around 985 kgCO₂e per person per year.

 

This means the average carbon footprint would need to be cut by nearly a factor of ten to stay within the climate boundary.

 

This threshold is open to debate, as Bjørn’s approach is egalitarian: each human being would have the same carbon budget, despite stark inequalities in living standards and development.

 

Digital scale

 

Producing and using a standard smartphone generates around 55 kgCO₂e across its life cycle.

 

In a digital sufficiency scenario, the carbon budget allocated to digital activities should represent 5–8% of the annual total, i.e. about 65 kgCO₂e per person (bearing in mind that the overall per capita threshold is 985 kgCO₂e).

 

A smartphone kept for two years equates to 27.5 kgCO₂e per year – already nearly half of the annual digital carbon budget (which is far too much).

 

When coupled with the Planetary Boundaries framework, Life Cycle Assessment places human activities within a global context of sustainability. It helps to inform decision-making at the scale of a product, a company or a territory, drawing on the principle of distributing the remaining budgets according to distributive justice and scale-down approaches.

 

Mike Nunes, LCA and eco-design project manager, planetary boundaries LCA lead at EVEA