A pragmatic and industry-oriented framework for data quality assessment of environmental footprint tools

Environmental footprinting, underpinned by systematic life-cycle thinking, is increasingly seen as a critical concept for designing policies to fight climate change. The holistic nature of a life-cycle approach, built using the principles of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), enables policy makers to understand the potential impacts and benefits of policy options. Although LCA is a widely used and well-established method, methodological aspects such as the quality of background data, model uncertainty, and comparison against existing literature are not usually communicated effectively to wider audiences, in particular policy makers. This paper introduces a novel hybrid data quality assessment method in the context of a case study based on the Scottish Waste Environmental Footprint Tool, a newly developed environmental life-cycle thinking tool. It offers an accessible method to present results of the data quality assessment of environmental models to policy makers and helps identify areas of improvements in future upgrades.