Environmental management of military systems: the use of Life-cycle assessment for sustainable planning
Abstract
Armed Forces activities pose considerable environmental and human health impacts that must be addressed. The United States Army alone in 2017 was responsible, only due to fuel used in their operations, for greater greenhouse gas emissions than entire industrialized countries such as Sweden or Denmark (Crawford, 2019). This shows that the assessment of the environmental impacts from military activities, and the management of those impacts, are critical. Management of environmental issues is mostly done due to legislation pressure, or by compliance checks of qualitative or semi-quantitative evaluations (e.g. risk or hazard assessment, audits, standards). These methodologies present some limitations, such as the absence of a quantitative evaluation, ignoring the real magnitude of the impacts and what it is contributing to those impacts; and the lack of a life-cycle approach in the environmental management of military activities that can steer to a focal perspective of the problems and, thus, missing important aspects.Life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology can cover the gaps to help the Armed Forces improve their environmental profile and achieve sustainable decision planning. Therefore, quantifying the potential environmental impacts of defense products or activities via the Life-cycle assessment methodology is of great value for the Armed Forces. This project has two major objectives: i) improving the environmental performance of military platforms and their operations; and ii) creating an environmental tool to assist procurement officers, range managers, or other stakeholders in defining sustainable strategies for their platforms or operations.The first objective is focused on improving the environmental performance of military platforms and their operations; thus, covering the gaps in environmental management in the defense area. For that purpose, the military platforms and their operations that will be studied are identified with the support of ONR. However, thecritical information should be kept confidential, so scenarios referent to general operations, instead of specific operations, are developed to maintain confidentiality. The data compilation, including fuel consumption, energy requirement, materials, and emissions is carried out for each platform and the operational scenarios. This task will require solid cooperation between the partners to obtain the data and to define how to handle data gaps. This data is converted into quantitative environmental impacts using life-cycle impact assessment methods (e.g. Environmental Footprint). Based on the results obtained some recommendations are proposed, aiming to improve the environmental performance of the platforms studied. The second objective of this project is referent to the creation of an environmental tool to assist procurement officers, range managers, or other stakeholders in defining sustainable strategies for their platforms or operations.This tool, based on a life-cycle approach, will include a database with information about general military products and operations. It will also incorporate life-cycle impact models to convert that information into environmental impacts. This tool can be tailored following the objectives of each stakeholder and should be user-friendly. Therefore, this tool will create the conditions, more simply, to perform the environmental assessment of defense systems and assist procurement officers, range managers, or other stakeholders in defining sustainable strategies for their platforms or activities. Thus, facilitating future studies, such as eco-design, green procurement, circular economy indicators, or legislation compliance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 09, 2024
- Source ID
- N000142512001
Entities
People
- José R. Ribeiro
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy