Harmonizing Aquatic Ecosystems Through LCIA
The availability and quality of water resources provide vital ecosystem services such as hydrological regulation, biodiversity conservation, and recreational use. Plant-fish coexistence, however, are exposed to multiple pressures from human activities that affect their structure and functioning as well as water quality. These pressures include fisheries, variable forms of leisure and recreation activities, and water uptake to meet local community demands for drinking water. A wide range of human activities can also induce a loss in the biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems, including long-term pollution that leads to severe ecological consequences like acidification and eutrophication of lakes or dissolved metal concentrations in sediments of rivers.
Community Involvement in Aquatic Ecosystem Conservation
Moreover, climate changes lead to year-to-year scarcity of precipitation, which diminishes freshwater resources, while hot summers boost evaporation and cyanobacterial proliferation (Owsianiak et al. 2015). Adding to the complexity, tropical and temperate aquatic ecosystems differ in terms of temperature and sensitivity to habitat disturbance, as well as the metabolic rates of their species.
In the context of these issues, this article reviews state-of-the-art approaches to harmonizing aquatic ecosystems through life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). The concept of harmonization is based on the principle that a chemical’s impact on different biota in different ecological compartments needs to be modeled using the same hazard concentration, i.e., the LCIA framework that uses a bioavailable chemical mass in freshwater as effect starting point. The application of this approach is challenging, however, due to the high statistical uncertainty in deriving multispecies hazard concentrations (Golsteijn et al. 2013) and the fact that metals are transferred between terrestrial and aquatic trophic levels via different pathways (Hop et al. 2002).
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