Beyond territorial Decarbonization: A systemic life cycle assessment for the French climate policy

National carbon neutrality strategies are assessed using territorial greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, which focuses on emissions occurring within national borders. While this approach is essential for international reporting, it overlooks emissions embedded in global supply chains and coherently ignores non-climate environmental impacts, potentially leading to environmental burden shifting. This study proposes a systemic life cycle assessment (LCA) framework to evaluate national carbon neutrality policies beyond territorial emissions, using the French National Low-Carbon Strategy as a case study. The results show that while the French scenario achieves its decarbonization objective at the territorial level by 2050, life cycle GHG emissions beyond national borders could represent 61% of the total emissions balance (some indirect emissions could be associated with activities carried out in France in previous years). Within France, the main remaining contributors are livestock-related agricultural activities and residual industrial processes. Furthermore, the multicriteria assessment reveals significant environmental trade-offs, notably potentially increased pressures on mineral and metallic resource use, water use, and human toxicity, despite overall improvements in most other impact categories. Beyond quantitative results, this study addresses key methodological challenges associated with applying LCA framework to national policy scenarios, including data granularity mismatches, prospective modelling of emerging technologies, and the management of double counting across sectors. The proposed framework is transferable to other national or regional contexts and provides critical insights for sustainability-oriented decision-making. Overall, the findings highlight the limitations of territorial carbon accounting and emphasize the need for life cycle-based, multicriteria approaches to support robust and globally consistent climate policy assessment.