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Maintaining quality critical peer review (CPR) as the demand for life cycle assessments increases
Citation:
CURRAN, M. A. Maintaining quality critical peer review (CPR) as the demand for life cycle assessments increases. Presented at the LIfe Cycle Management (LCM) Conference, Berlin, GERMANY, August 28 - 31, 2011.
Impact/Purpose:
To inform EPA
Description:
Environmental managers and government policy makers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to follow the holistic approach of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to move us in the right strategic direction to best achieve environmental sustainability. Along with this realization has been an explosive growth in the number of published LCA studies. Now the LCA community is faced with a serious challenge of meeting the growing demand for critical peer review (CPR) with an adequate supply of available, qualified experts to serve as technical reviewers. A recent search (by the author) in SCOPUS on the term “life cycle assessment” resulted in 4,500 citations between 1999 and 2010. Further, according to SCOPUS, five journals published the most on LCA (around 1500 papers): International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (828); Journal of Cleaner Production (256); Journal of Industrial Ecology (159); Environmental Science & Technology (145); and Resource Conservation and Recycling (109). Looking at CPR of publications versus critical review of LCA studies themselves, this paper addresses key issues the LCA community faces in the peer-review process, namely, the limited number of qualified reviewers, the lack of an agreedon review process, the growing popularity of the use of life-cycle based approaches, and the use of public databases which requires CPR to be handled in a different manner since reviewers cannot easily review all the underlying data, models and assumptions. [NOTE: See LCM2011 url, 8/30/11, Session Critical Review and Verification of LCA #5]
