The LCA discussion fora have a long history of contributing to research and improved practice. On September 13, 2013, the 53rd LCA discussion forum was held in Zurich. Its formal title was Uncertainty in Life Cycle Assessment: State of the art and practical challenges, but we can shorten that to just Uncertainty in LCA, and it was organized by Catherine Raptis, Stephan Pfister, and myself.

In contrast to most recent discussion fora, we purposefully chose fewer speakers and more time for discussion. We also included a group exercise later in the day, which is risky because most people are tired and ready to leave. However, I think that this discussion forum was actually really great, and the slower pace and increased interaction allowed for some real thought and conversation. I hope that future organizers will chose to have fewer talks.

You can find the talks online as videos, as well as see separate uploads of the slides (soon). We will also be writing up a conference report in the near future.

As Brightway2 has some powerful and unique computational abilities, it was used in several of the talks, and I hope that Brightway2 can help continue to advance the state of the art in uncertainty and sensitivity analysis in LCA.