The LCA Responsibility Framework

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely used to inform sustainability decisions. It provides a structured way to quantify and compare environmental pressures. At the same time, LCA itself does not determine decisions; interpretation, prioritisation, and the acceptance of trade-offs remain the responsibility of institutions and decision-makers. In practice, this boundary is often blurred. LCA results are treated as objective verdicts, with rankings or aggregated scores used to justify decisions while obscuring trade-offs and shifting responsibility to models or indicators. This creates a structural risk: even technically correct LCAs can legitimise harm when values and non-negotiables remain implicit. The LCA Responsibility Framework addresses this gap by providing an explicit architecture for interpretation and responsibility, clarifying where scientific analysis ends and decision-making begins. The framework builds on ISO 14040/44–compliant LCA practice and standard LCIA methods, while introducing one critical addition: an explicit pre-analytical values articulation step, which ISO deliberately leaves implicit. This step clarifies what must not be traded away and which systems are considered essential to protect or strengthen over time, before modelling choices narrow the space of possible outcomes. Values are treated as external to the model. They guide interpretation but are not calculated by LCA. The framework distinguishes clearly between three domains of responsibility: 1. Science, which defines cause–effect relationships and impact pathways; 2. Technicians and LCA modellers, who implement models, data, and calculations; 3. Decision-makers, who set purpose, values, priorities, and accept responsibility for trade-offs and consequences. Across twenty levels, the framework maps how uncertainty changes in nature as an assessment progresses and how responsibility shifts upward from modelling to judgment. Early framing choices determine what becomes visible or invisible. Later numerical precision cannot compensate for misaligned goals, boundaries, or value assumptions. Weighting, ranking, and aggregation are treated not as neutral techniques, but as value-laden interpretative tools that compress information and reduce visibility of trade-offs. The LCA Responsibility Framework is designed to be interoperable with existing sustainability and reporting frameworks, including ISO LCA standards, CSRD, EU Taxonomy–adjacent use, GHG accounting, SBTi, TCFD, and TNFD. It does not define compliance, thresholds, or eligibility. Its role is meta-level: to support transparent interpretation, defensible governance, and explicit ownership of decisions when LCA and related tools are used. By restoring the distinction between analysis and judgment, the framework enables LCA to function as what it was always meant to be: a decision-support instrument, not a decision substitute.