Blog archive: October 2017

New names for our LCIA courses

October 10, 2017 by ILCA

Have you ever considered how convoluted our LCA slang is for newcomers?

LCI and LCIA are two phases of LCA. LCI is the acronym for Life Cycle Inventory Analysis, and thus should reasonably be expected to be abbreviated LCIA. But LCIA is used for LC Impact Assessment, so…

Anyway, it is easy to confuse LCIA and LCA, and really there is only the word “Impact” to distinguish the two. And is LCA not about impacts?

This confusion was made obvious to us when we launched our two LCIA courses recently. From the questions we received, we discovered that the title “Fundamentals of Life Cycle Impact Assessment” was read as “Fundamentals of Life Cycle Assessment” – and really: How should we expect newcomers to know any better?

So we have decided to re-name this course to “Managing the LCIA (impact assessment) phase of LCA”. This course gives the basic skills for truly understanding and navigating the LCIA phases of LCA. And to be consistent, we also renamed the advanced course to “Advanced LCIA (impact assessment) modelling”. This course gives a deep dive into the modelling aspects involved in the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase of LCA studies and gives the practitioner really advanced skills.