Making agricultural Life Cycle Assessment tools effective

Customized life cycle assessment (LCA) tools are potentially valuable for facilitating eco-design in agriculture, but if not effective are prone to being under-utilised. We drew on the experiences of tool developers to identify the key challenges and opportunities for making tools effective (based on effectiveness criteria defined in earlier research), and to propose practical recommendations to inform future tool development. Priority recommendation are online hosting, uncertainty analysis, data input from farm data systems, results categorised by practices, consensus best-practice methods, accounting for diverse practices, regionalized analysis, and capitalizing on agriculturist knowledge