Life-cycle assessment and triple planetary crisis: A review on methodological gaps and potential future improvements

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution collectively called the triple planetary crisis are creating serious pressure on the earth system. Addressing these connected environmental challenges requires scientific tools that can measure environmental impacts and support better decisions. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to evaluate emissions, resource use, and environmental impacts across the full life cycle of products, processes, and systems. Here, we use a systematic literature review (SLR) approach to examine how LCA can support actions related to climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. We also explore how LCA can be connected with the planetary boundaries (PBs) framework to evaluate whether human activities remain within safe environmental limits. Our review identifies several important methodological gaps in current LCA practice. These include limited spatial and temporal detail, weak coverage of biodiversity and pollution impacts, insufficient consideration of earth-system feedbacks, and limited integration with planetary thresholds. We found that climate-related LCA methods are more advanced, while biodiversity and pollution assessments are still fragmented and less developed. The review also shows that combining LCA with PBs and related sustainability frameworks can improve the assessment of environmental risks, reduce burden shifting, and support science-based sustainability targets. Overall, this study shows that LCA has strong potential to move beyond product-level comparisons and become a broader decision-support tool for guiding sustainability transitions within the earth safe operating space.