Prospective AWARE
What is prospective AWARE?
Prospective AWARE factors can be used for prospective LCAs or water footprint studies. For example, if the water-consumption-related environmental impact of a new product is of interest, but the product will only be available on the market several years into the future, prospective factors may be applicable. By design, prospective factors follow certain future scenarios, usually based on assumptions about global warming and socioeconomic development. These scenarios depend on factors such as global efforts to reduce global warming, the level of international collaboration on social, economic, and environmental issues, and the overall economic development.
Why Use Prospective AWARE?
Companies assessing products with long lifespans or setting future water targets need to understand whether water stress will increase or decrease in key sourcing regions. Examples for corporate use cases are therefore
- Long-term supply chain risk assessment
- Strategic sourcing and technology decisions
- Strengthening the basis for water stewardship claims
General research questions can be
- Identifying regions facing increasing water challenges
- Assessing the future viability and sustainability of different diets
- Optimizing energy system modeling towards lower water consumption impacts
How to use prospective AWARE?
Using prospective characterization factors in standard LCA software is challenging, since distributing impacts over time is not possible in most of the commercially available software. For prospective AWARE2.0, the Paul-Scherrer-Institute provides an implementation in the brightway-based tool edges (click here to see example).Prospective AWARE carries inherent uncertainty: future water availability depends on climate models, socioeconomic pathways, and management decisions that remain difficult to predict. Uncertainty should always be taken into account in prospective assessments.
Publications and datasets
Different research groups have developed prospective datasets for AWARE, linked below.
Prospective AWARE2.0:
Seitfudem, G., Berger, M., & Boulay, A.-M. (2026). Harnessing model ensembles to assess uncertainty and provide prospective characterization factors for AWARE2.0. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 31(6), 98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-026-02648-7,
factors available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19637310 and implemented in above-mentioned tool
Prospective AWARE:
Baustert, P., Igos, E., Schaubroeck, T., Chion, L., Mendoza Beltran, A., Stehfest, E., van Vuuren, D., Biemans, H., & Benetto, E. (2022). Integration of future water scarcity and electricity supply into prospective LCA: Application to the assessment of water desalination for the steel industry. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 26(4), 1182–1194. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13272,
factors available in their Supplementary Material
Vasilakou, K., Nimmegeers, P., Billen, P., & Van Passel, S. (2026). Prospective water scarcity footprint under climate change applied to bio-based sustainable aviation fuel production pathways. iScience, 29(4), 115435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.115435,
factors available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.27901818
Sanchez-Matos, J., Vázquez-Rowe, I., & Kahhat, R. (2024). AWARE characterization factors in Peru encompassing El Niño and climate change events: Does increased water availability guarantee less water scarcity? The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11367-024-02369-9,
factors for Peruvian watersheds available in their Supplementary Material