IMPACT World+ / a globally regionalized method for life cycle impact assessment

IMPACT World+ is a life cycle impact assessment methodology which characterizes thousands of substances spanning across many compartments and sub-compartments of the environment. It differentiates 45 impact categories, both at midpoint and damage levels.

For more information on IW+, refer to our website (https://www.impactworldplus.org/) and scientific article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-019-01583-0).

New in 2.0.1

• Version 2.0.1 introduces different versions of IW+, namely, the footprint, expert and midpoint versions of IW+.
• Updated the midpoint climate change-related categories to the values in the IPCC2021-AR6
• Created a characterization factor for unspecified land use type

The precise report of changes (flow by flow) can be found here: https://github.com/CIRAIG/IWP_Reborn/tree/master/Report_changes

Footprint version

This version simplifies the interpretation of IW+ to 5 categories:

- "Carbon footprint": A carbon footprint indicator, based on the "Climate change, short term" midpoint indicator of IW+.

- "Water scarcity footprint": A water scarcity footprint indicator, based on the "Water scarcity" midpoint indicator of IW+.

- "Fossil and nuclear energy use": An indicator focusing on the use of fossil and nuclear resources, based on the "Fossil and nuclear energy use" midpoint indicator of IW+.

- "Remaining Human health damage": The Human health Area of Protection from which the impacts of Climate change and of Water availability were removed, as these two indicators are covered separately. In addition, all long terms impact categories and emissions are excluded.

- "Remaining Ecosystem quality damage": The Ecosystem quality Area of Protection from which the impacts of Climate change and of Water availability were removed, as these two indicators are covered separately. In addition, all long terms impact categories and emissions are excluded.

Expert version

Version only including the 27 damage categories of IW+.

Midpoint version

Version only including the 18 midpoint categories of IW+.

The different files

• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_dev.xlsx - The dev file is a file useful for developers and maintainers of databases/datasets who wish to link IW+ 2.0.1 to their databases/datasets.
• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_xxxxx_version_ecoinvent_v3x.xlsx - These Excel files match IW+ to "pure" ecoinvent (as in unaltered by various software) in an Excel table
• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_expert_version_exiobase.xlsx - This file links IW+ to the Exiobase GMRIO database (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5589597). Once the file is read through pandas (pandas.read_excel()), the resulting matrix can directly be multiplied to the environmental extensions of exiobase (S, F or F_Y if using the pymrio package).
• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_xxxxx_version_openLCA.zip - These files link openLCA elementary flows to IW+. They can be directly downloaded in the openLCA software as a JSON-LD file.
• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_xxxxx_version_simapro.csv - These file link SimaPro elementary flows to IW+. They can be directly downloaded in the SimaPro software.
• impact_world_plus_2.0.1_source.accdb - This is the source file. This file is only useful for the IW+ internal team. It is provided for transparency, as well as for users who wish to generate all these files themselves through the open-access code of IW+.
• impact_world_plus_201_xxxxx_version_brightway2.______.bw2package - These file link brightway2 elementary flows to IW+. The current files work with the biosphere3 version corresponding to ecoinvent3.8. To import the file, you need to pass through brightway itself (it cannot be done through the activity-browser for now). The function to import a .bw2packge file is bw2.BW2Package.import_file().