Import-based Indicator for the Geopolitical Supply Risk of Raw Materials in Life Cycle Sustainability Assessments

There is a growing concern over the security and sustainable supply of raw material among businesses and governments of developed, material-intensive countries. This has led to the development of a systematic analysis of risk incorporated with raw materials usage, often referred as criticality assessment. In principle, this concept is based on the material flow approach. The potential role of life cycle assessment (LCA) to integrate resource criticality through broadening its scope into the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework has been discussed within the LCA communities for some time. In this article, we aim at answering the question of how to proceed toward integration of the geopolitical aspect of resource criticality into the LCSA framework. The article focuses on the assessment of the geopolitical supply risk of 14 resources imported to the seven major advanced economies and the five most relevant emerging countries. Unlike a few previous studies, we propose a new method of calculation for the geopolitical supply risk, which is differentiated by countries based on the import patterns instead of a global production distribution. Our results suggest that rare earth elements, tungsten, antimony, and beryllium generally pose high geopolitical supply risk. Results from the Monte Carlo simulation allow consideration of data uncertainties for result interpretation. Issues concerning the consideration of the full supply chain are exemplarily discussed for cobalt. Our research broadens the scope of LCA from only environmental performance to a resource supply-risk assessment tool that includes accessibility owing to political instability and market concentration under the LCSA framework.