SustainablE land use planning using spatialized territorial LifE Cycle optimization (SELECT)

The general goal of this research is to support decision-making in land use planning in the context of agricultural territory by combining the analytical power of life cycle thinking and scenario-building power of optimization and dynamic simulation. The main driving force to this research lies in the context of society's transition towards a bio-based and circular economy, where biomass products are in surging demand to improve sustainability development. In parallel to the potential benefits, this transition challenges land use planners because this surging demand also means increasing competition for limited land to produce various biomass products.
In this context, there is a growing interest in developing decision-support tools for assessing the impacts of agricultural land planning. In the first stage of this Ph.D. project, we aim to link the territorial LCA with spatial optimization (tLCA-Optimization), generating land planning scenarios that are already optimized along with multiple environmental objectives. The developed model mainly employs three decision-support tools, i.e., territorial LCA, multi-objective optimization, and GIS (Geographical Information System). The optimized land planning scenarios consider the site-specific characteristics, e.g., soil types that can be stable for a long time. Since the land uses could change over time mainly depending on farmers' decisions considering dynamic factors (e.g., price), the land-use scenarios which are currently optimal might not maintain optimal in the future. Therefore, in the second stage of the project, we aim to enhance the model for evaluating dynamic systems. In specific, we first developed the dynamic territorial LCA by integrating Agent-based modeling (ABM), which could potentially generate more realistic land-use scenarios considering farmers' decision power. Then by integrating ABM in our developed "tLCA-optimization," we could generate the optimal scenarios that could have lower impacts over time.

F.R.S.-FNRS, Appel : Aspirant/ASP

2018 - 2022

Life cycle assessment, Territory, Land planning, Environmental impacts, Agriculture, Optimization, Agent-based modeling, Geographical Information System

• Supervisor : Prof. Wouter Achten
• Researcher : Tianran Ding

• Ding T, Bourrelly S, Achten WMJ (2020) Operationalising territorial life cycle inventory through the development of territorial emission factor for European agricultural land use. J Clean Prod 263:121565. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.121565
• Ding T, Bourrelly S, Achten WMJ (2021) Application of territorial emission factors with open-access data—a territorial LCA case study of land use for livestock production in Wallonia. Int J Life Cycle Assess. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-021-01949-3
• Présentation de la 1ère conférence du LCIC in Berlin 29-31/09/2018
• Présentation de la conférence SETAC 07/05/2020