

Background & project objective
Building on the consensus-building work on life cycle impact assessment since its launch in 2002, the Life Cycle Initiative started GLAM, to establish a comprehensive, consistent and global Environmental Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method, covering classification, characterization, normalization and weighting to assess the life-cycle impacts of products and services on human health, ecosystem quality and natural resources, with the contribution from more than 200 scientists.
The GLAM method categorizes environmental impacts into these main Areas of Protection (AoPs):
Ecosystem quality — Represents potential damage on biodiversity, focusing on species vulnerability and harmonizing previous recommendations related to land and water use, ecotoxicity, eutrophication, microplastics, acidification and climate change.
Human health — Represents potential damage on human population lifetime loss expressed in Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs), focusing on climate change, fine particulate matter impacts, toxicity, work environment impacts, lifestyle impacts including nutrition and physical activity, ionising radiation, and water scarcity.
Socio-economic assets — Evaluates the values of natural resources and ecosystem services from land use for human well-being.
Normalization and weighting — Applies a calculation framework to get a global normalization inventory and deterministic weights for all impact categories. It also ensures consistent LCI-LCIA linkage in collaboration with the global nomenclature system developed in GLAD to facilitate the implementation of the GLAM LCIA method in LCA software.
Project output
The official characterization factors and full documentation of the GLAM life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method are found on its official website: https://www.lifecycleinitiative.org/activities/life-cycle-assessment-data-and-methods/global-guidance-for-life-cycle-impact-assessment-indicators-and-methods-glam
Additional project output documents can be found in below table.
Document title | Download file |
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Global Guidance for Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicators: Volume 1 | Download Report Download Characterization Factors |
Global Guidance on Environmental Life Cycle Impact Assessment Indicators: Volume 2 | Download Report |