What is needed for the widespread use of prospective LCI (pLCI) databases in prospetive LCA (pLCA) practice? In this comentary article, we explore those conditions we considered necesary for the use of state-of-the-art, science-based, useful, accesible, interpretable and well mantained pLCI databases. This is important, as much of the technologies needed to achieve net-zero goals, among other important global environmental targets, are still in their infancy and will only enter the market around mid of the century, thus the temporal horizon to study them is in the mid to long term future. We hope this comentary will stir important discussion in the field of pLCA.

We are very happy to present this regionalized LCA of peri-urban agriculture in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, which provides a baseline for further analysis of prospective scenarios as originally intended in PROTEAN. 

We found that regionalization of inventories and of impact assessment methods are important for capturing environmental impacts of UA at appropriate scales. Also, we did a big effort on compiling inventories for the whole region displaying the variability introduced by the different practices and land uses. Yet, these need to be completed and confirmed with primary data, to capture a much broader range of impacts as well as reduce uncertainty due to unrepresentative data. The study provides esential knowledge to guide suitable sustainability strategies for peri-UA.

Lack of spatially-relevant datasets hinders the estimation of nitrous oxide emissions from peri-urban agriculture. Opportunities for sustainable, local-food production in cities - arising from their mitigation, could be overlooked. We estimate peri-urban agriculture's N2O emissions for the metropolitan area of Barcelona, a region looking to become more circular and sustainable. We hope they will feed more sustainability studies for the region and future scenarios towards PROTEAN main aim of estimating future impacts of urban food production with prospective LCA.

In this essay, published in the journal of Landscape and Urban Planning, we argue that urban agriculture (UA) deserves stronger consideration in land-use planning as it holds the potential to enhance urban resilience, global sustainability and multifunctionality - as a multifunctional nature-based solution. Considering these three aspects in land-use planning is therefore vital to give UA its true value.

With big thanks to co-authors, I am happy to share that the base manuscript for PROTEAN "When the Background Matters: Using Scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models in Prospective Life Cycle Assessment", is among the 10% most downloaded papers in the Journal of Industrial Ecology*. Looking forward to continue building on this work within PROTEAN.