Arnaud Hélias

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Department of Environment and Agronomy

Overexploitation in wild-capture fisheries is a principal driver of marine biodiversity loss. Currently, efforts are underway to improve the representation of marine damage indicators in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods. The recently operationalised fisheries impact pathway has introduced fishing impacts on the marine system into the LCI...

During wastewater treatment, micropollutants are only partly eliminated and may present a risk for human health and aquatic ecosystems. The potential impacts these substances may have are currently underestimated due to the lack in available concentrations that lie below the limit of quantification (LOQ) for an important set of micropollutants. Her...

The imperative of carbon neutrality requires a drastic, rapid, and sustained reduction in fossil energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The Russia-Ukraine war has led to a major energy crisis, whose end does not seem imminent. The sudden and major increase in energy prices resulting from this crisis has major impacts on many sectors of th...

Purpose Although life cycle impact assessment methods exist for quantifying land use and its impact on the environment in the “ecosystem quality” area of protection, the impact of sea use on ecosystems has been poorly assessed so far. This paper aims to propose operational characterisation factors for all global fisheries. Methods For a given inte...

By analogy to conventional environmental impacts, the potential release of debris or generation of fragments can be considered as the emission of an environmental stressor damaging the orbital ‘natural’ resource which supports space activities. Hence, it appears relevant to integrate systematically the impact of the emission of debris on the orbita...

Consumers increasingly demand information about the environmental impacts of their food. The French government is in the process of introducing environmental labelling for all food products. A scientific council was set up, and its main conclusions are presented in this article, through six questions: What environmental issues should be considered?...

This paper aims to assess the conditions under which hydraulic projects can be considered as an efficient option, from an environmental point of view, to secure water supply of agricultural areas using the Territorial Life Cycle Assessment (T-LCA) methodology. Firstly, the environmental performance of three theoretical agricultural land-use plannin...

Food consumption represents an important part of our ecological footprint (Sala et al., 2019), therefore changes in food consumption habits can greatly help to mitigate it. In order to help consumers to make more informed food consumption choices, several ecolabelling initiatives have been developed recently by institutional and private actors (ADE...

Purpose Overfishing has been a global challenge for several decades with severe impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Several approaches for assessing overfishing in life cycle impact assessment exist, but do not consider scarcity in line with current policy and science-based targets. Furthermore, comparisons of results with other impact...

Peer Community Journal It is a real challenge for life cycle assessment practitioners to identify all relevant substances contributing to ecotoxicity. Once this identification has been made, the lack of corresponding ecotoxicity factors can make the results partial and difficult to interpret. So, it is a real and important challenge to provide eco...

Trois spécialistes de l’agronomie, Yannick Biard, Arnaud Hélias et Hayo van der Werf, répondent aux inquiétudes exprimées par 137 parlementaires dans une tribune publiée dans « Le Monde » en décembre, et défendent l’analyse sur laquelle repose le futur affichage environnemental des produits alimentaires. Le Monde https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/arti...

En application de l’article 15 de la loi relative à la lutte contre le gaspillage alimentaire et à l’économie circulaire (loi AGEC de 2020), remplacé par l'article 2 de la loi Climat et résilience (2021), le Ministère de la Transition Écologique et l’Ademe ont lancé une Expérimentation en vue de concevoir et mettre en place un système d’affichage e...

During wastewater treatment, incomplete elimination of micropollutants occurs. Recently, the potential impacts of the release of some micropollutants at the scale of France have been studied. These impacts calculations were incomplete due to a lack of characterization factors. In the present study, we used already developed machine learning models...

Le Conseil Scientifique (CS) considère qu’il est possible de concevoir et de mettre en place un système d’affichage environnemental, qui réponde aux attentes exprimées par le législateur dans la loi AGEC (2020), puis dans l'article 2 de la loi Climat et résilience (2021). Dans cette perspective, les travaux menés par le CS, sur la base de la littér...

Institut du Développement Durable et des Relations Internationales: Paris, France

It is a real challenge for life cycle assessment practitioners to identify all relevant substances contributing to the ecotoxicity. Once this identification has been made, the lack of corresponding ecotoxicity factors can make the results partial and difficult to interpret. So, it is a real and important challenge to provide ecotoxicity factors for...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to address the environmental benefit of using Equilibrium Modified Atmosphere Packaging (EMAP) at ambient temperature as an alternative to the use of conventional macro perforated packaging (MPP) and refrigeration in the strawberries’ farm to fork system. In this purpose, the environmental impact of strawberries...

An innovative method is described, assessing the energy flows in farm systems. These systems represent both a socio-economic activity and an agroecosystem. Both market and ecosystem flows are inventoried, focusing on farm agroecosystem circularity of the reinvested biomass. An original system representation is proposed, where process and energy sto...

Purpose The objective of the present study was to better understand the potential environmental benefit of using vine shoots (ViShs), an agricultural residue, as filler in composite materials. For that purpose, a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of a rigid tray made of virgin poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) PHBV, polylactic acid...

Supplementary Materials of the article: Hercher-Pasteur J, Loiseau E, Sinfort C, Hélias A (2021) Identifying the resource use and circularity in farm systems: Focus on the energy analysis of agroecosystems. Resour Conserv Recycl 169:105502. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105502

Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data are the backbone of Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). They reflectmodelling choices made by the LCA practitioner that can strongly influence the results ofenvironmental impact calculations. The high sensitivity of these data are the reason why theymust be accurately documented and tend to the highest possible quality. High...

Micropollutants emitted by Human activities represent a potential threat to our health and aquatic environment. Thousands of active substances are used and go to WWTP through wastewaters. During water treatment, incomplete elimination occurs. Effluents released to the environment still contain part of the micropollutants present in the influents. H...

One-third of the global fish stocks are classified as overfished. Life cycle impact assessment methods for overfishing exist but are not fully implemented and do not allow to compare results of different impact categories. Thus, a new approach based on the ecological scarcity method (ESC) was developed to be applied in life cycle assessment (LCA) a...

Wastewater treatment using oxygenic photogranule-based process has lower environmental impact than conventional activated sludge process, Bioresource Technology (2020), doi: https://doi. Abstract: The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was applied to assess the environmental feasibility of a novel wastewater treatment technology based on oxyge...

Energy holds a key role in farm systems. Cultivation is based on the conversion of solar energy into biomass of interest. Fossil energy allows mechanized and high-yield agricultural production system, but has a strong impact on climate change, and its supply is compromised in the next decades. Energy flows stand between two worlds: while energy is...

Purpose Ongoing debates focus on the role of forest-sourced bioenergy within climate mitigation efforts, due to the long rotation lengths of forest biomass. Valuing sequestration is debated due to its reversibility; however, dynamic modelling of biogenic carbon (Cbio) flows captures both negative and positive emissions. The objective of this work i...

In life cycle assessment (LCA), temporal considerations are usually lost during the life cycle inventory calculation, resulting in an aggregated “snapshot” of potential impacts. Disregarding such temporal considerations has previously been underlined as an important source of uncertainty, but a growing number of approaches have been developed to ta...

The Available WAter REmaining (AWARE) model highlights the importance of considering consumption rather than withdrawal and takes into account spatial variability. It results from a massive and collective effort on behalf of the Water Use in LCA (WULCA) working group. The AWARE model provides a consensual, operational and recommended indicator for...

Fisheries modified all the marine ecosystems. If Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) successes to quantify the land use its consequences on the environment (the ecosystem quality area of protection (AoP)) the impact of sea use on ecosystems appears poorly assessed by LCA community. To our knowledge, there is no approach assessing ecosystem impact of fisher...

Satellites orbiting Earth are used in many areas and disciplines, including space science, Earth observation, meteorology, climate research. A rising sustainability concern is occurring in the space sector: 29,000 human-made objects, larger than 10cm, are orbiting the Earth but only 6% are operational spacecraft. The others, considered as space deb...

Renewable energy carriers and biomaterials originating from dedicated and residual forestry and agricultural biomass (e.g. energy crops, woody residues, and perennial grasses) are promoted as carbon neutral options to displace/offset fossil carbon and mitigate climate change. The exclusion of the temporal variability of biogenic carbon (Cbio) flows...

The last 10 years of research in the field of life cycle assessment (LCA) have unveiled many possible pathways to consider the effects of temporal variations from supply chains on the assessment of potential environmental impacts for products, services and markets with dynamic LCA (i.e. DLCA) frameworks. In this context, defining “useful” levels of...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides a structured framework, addressing environmental impacts of human activities. LCA requires consensual and scientifically sound characterisation factors to quantify impacts and allow comparisons. This is the objective of the AWARE model, recently published by an international consortium, which is now the referenc...

The process-based life cy­cle as­sess­ments (LCA) of goods and ser­vices are cal­cu­lated us­ing a bot­tom-up ap­proach re­lated to a func­tional unit. How­ever, this does not pro­vide any in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing the scale of the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts. There­fore, the nor­mal­iza­tion al­lows to re­late the im­pacts to a ref­er­ence sys­tem...

Low carbon strategies recently focus on soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration potentials from agriculture and forestry, while Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) increasingly becomes the framework of choice to estimate the environmental impacts of these activities. Classic LCA is limited to static carbon neutral approaches, disregarding dynamic SOC flows...

Background: Microalgae are 10 to 20 times more productive than the current agricultural biodiesel producing oleaginous crops. However, they require larger energy supplies, so that their environmental impacts remain uncertain, as illustrated by the contradictory results in the literature. Besides, solar radiation is often too high relative to the p...

Conférence invitée à Agrosup Dijon, Séminaire "la pluridisciplinarité scientifique à l'épreuve de la transition alimentaire"

In LCIA, the resource issue is still debated and remains the least consensual area of concern. The currently popular assessment models for resource depletion are based on “heuristic” considerations. This presentation deals with the use of a stock dynamic model to address the resource depletion by marginal approach. Based on empirical data simulatin...

Assessing the state of fish stocks requires the determination of descriptors. They correspond to the absolute and relative (to the carrying capacity of the habitat) fish biomasses in the ecosystem, and the absolute and relative (to the intrinsic growth rate of the population) fishing mortality resulting from catches. This allows, among other things...

The data and analyses presented support the research article entitled “Coupling partial-equilibrium and dynamic biogenic carbon models to assess future transport scenarios in France” (Albers et al., 2019). Carbon sequestration and storage in forestry products (e.g. transport fuels) is sought as a climate change mitigation option. The data presented...

Bioenergy systems are promoted in an effort to mitigate climate change, and policies are defined accordingly to be implemented in the coming decades. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used to assess the environmental performance of bioenergy systems, yet subject to the limitations of static approaches. In classical LCA, no temporal differentiation is...

Understanding the environmental profile of a product computed from the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework is sometimes challenging due to the high number of environmental indicators involved. The objective here, in guiding interpretation of LCA results, is to highlight the importance of each impact category for each product alternative studied....

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Energy modelling is a central instrument for energy system planning. However, assessment of climate change impacts use static approaches and do not account biogenic carbon (Cbio) emissions. The present study addresses dynamic assessment shortcomings of bioenergy systems to assist energy policy-making. We propose a coupling strategy combining the TI...

When exchanging LCI data between LCA dedicated software, LCA practitioners often face technical restrictions of the software as well as potential lack of metadata on the datasets quality, limiting their reuse, update and improvement. To address these issues and facilitate LCI dataset exchanges within a community of scientists working on separate LC...

Natural resources are probably the most un-consensual area of concern in Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Very few works deal with biotic resource. Current Life Cycle Assessment framework is only at the onset for estimating impacts of fish removal. This study shows outlines of a recent work (Hélias et al. (2018), Fish Fish, in press) proposing a new m...

In the LCA framework, resources remain the most non-consensual area of protection and more specifically, no operational methods exist for biotic resources. This work provides ready-to-use characterisation factors (CF) to tackle stock depletion for global fisheries. CFs are based on FAO data, the well-used Schaefer model for fish stock dynamic, and...

Life cycle impact assessment uses so-called characterization factors to address different types of environmen- tal impact (e.g. climate change, particulate matter, land use...). For the topic of resource depletion, a series of proposals was based on heuristic and formal arguments, but without the use of expert-based models from relevant research ar...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the normed and international framework for assessing the environmental impacts of most human activities. LCA is commonly used to assess various aspects of fisheries but is only at the onset for estimating impacts of fish removal. This study proposes original characterization factors (CFs) to quantify impacts on biotic...

Agricultural utilization of organic residues is often included in Life cycle assessment (LCA) studies on livestock and crop production as well as waste and wastewater treatment. A review on the current state-of-the-art practices in agricultural use of organic residues in LCA studies is presented. This reveals that agricultural use of organic residu...

Freshwater resource has been recognized as being a safeguard subject within the Area of Protection (AoP) natural resources (WULCA resource group framework). Besides depletion also long-term pollution threatens the sustainability of freshwater resources, but currently no LCIA model links emissions to potential damage on freshwater as a natural resou...

Biotic natural resources have received little attention by the LCA community and this tempers the use of LCA for fish based food and feed products. Current LCA methods do not assess the impacts of biotic removal on biotic stocks very well. The dynamic of biotic stocks (i.e. population) is a well-studied topic in theoretical ecology and it is common...

Several life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) models have been proposed to quantify potential water consumption impacts on freshwater ecosystems. In existing mechanistic models, mostly based on species-discharge and species-area relationships, ecological requirements are not taken into account. This implies considering equal response to stress for di...

Energy production and consumption is the main driver for anthropogenic GHG emissions, and in the French context, the transportation sector is the principal emitter accounting for almost one third of these emissions. The growing need to reduce GHG emissions and mitigate climate change demands tapping alternative energy resources, as currently enforc...

LCA is intrinsically a multicriteria approach comparing (almost) all the potential environmental impacts of human activities. However, multicriteria decisions pose challenges as a wide range of environmental impacts results may lead to unclear conclusions. Based on their relevance, a choice among the impact categories may be necessary. It can be ca...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) characterises all the exchanges between human driven activities and the environment, thus representing a powerful approach for tackling the environmental impact of a production system. However, LCA practitioners must still choose the appropriate Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method to use and are expected to justif...

We performed a cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) of a bio-based cosmetic cream containing Refined Palm Kernel Oil (RPKO). The objective was to investigate the importance of the RPKO production within the environmental impact of the cosmetic cream. We assumed a baseline scenario with best oil palm agricultural practices in Malaysia, and th...

A H2 production system via biogas reforming was comprehensively investigated by life cycle assessment (LCA), after identification of the optimal thermodynamic operating conditions computed from a detailed analysis of the involved chemical reactions. The system boundaries for the LCA include biogas production, biogas reforming as well as constructio...

Algae are an attractive, alternative renewable source for biofuel production compared to biomass from food crops or cellulosic materials. Marine algae do not need fresh water or arable land and, thus, production of marine algae does not compete with food production. In contrast to biofuel production from microalgae, the use of macroalgal biomass as...

Purpose The impact of human activities on marine environments is poorly addressed by the scope of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). The aim of this study is to provide characterization factors to assess impacts of sea use such as fishing activities or seafloor destruction and transformation on the life support functions of marine ecosystems. Met...

Purpose. The impact of human activities on marine environments is poorly addressed by the scope of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA). The aim of this study is to provide characterization factors to assess impacts of sea use such as fishing activities or seafloor destruction and transformation on the life support functions of marine ecosystems. Me...

Algae are an attractive, alternative renewable source for biofuel production compared to biomass from food crops or cellulosic materials. Marine algae do not need fresh water or arable land and, thus, production of marine algae does not compete with food production. In contrast to biofuel production from microalgae, the use of macroalgal biomass as...

Langlois et al. (2012; 2014a) proposed characterization factors (CF) for fish biotic resource extraction impact assessment at the species level. This paper is an improvement of this approach. In the present work, the CF depends on the Maximum Sustainability Yield (MSY), weighted by the ratio of the current total fishing effort to the fishing effort...

Langlois et al. (2012; 2014a) proposed characterization factors (CF) for fish biotic resource extraction impact assessment at the species level. This paper is an improvement of this approach. In the present work, the CF depends on the Maximum Sustainability Yield (MSY), weighted by the ratio of the current total fishing effort to the fishing effort...

This work is a review of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies dealing with agricultural use of fertilizing residues (FR). The majority of the studies were dedicated to LCA of waste and wastewater treatment systems and, in few cases, to agricultural productions. In most of the studies on LCA of waste and wastewater treatment, FR spreading induces tox...

Purpose The present study provides a review on sea-use impacts and how they are handled in life cycle assessments (LCA). It aims at defining the impact pathways for occupation and transformation impacts on marine ecosystems due to human activities (constructions, fishing, aquaculture, navigation). Methods First, a review was performed on human inte...

It is difficult to address all of the direct environmental impacts of fisheries using conventional methods of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). A methodological framework was developed that calculates regionalised characterisation factors for biomass uptake by fishing activities to assess impacts of biotic-resource depletion at both species and ecosyste...