Avoiding unintended tradeoffs by integrating life-cycle impact assessment with urban metabolism

Urban sustainability assessment should integrate urban metabolism and life-cycle impact assessment to develop an integrated multi-scale framework for evaluating resource depletion and damages to human health and environmental quality. A streamlined framework can be developed by employing emerging neighborhood-scale data, improving resource depletion and damage to human health and environmental quality characterizations, including socio-demographic characteristics, and integrating methods for making decisions with uncertainty. Foundational elements and an analytical path exist to integrate urban metabolism and life-cycle impact assessment in a streamlined manner. Urban sustainability practitioners must eventually develop new methods for integrating social, institutional, and cultural forces instead of focusing on physical systems.