The life cycle impact assessment method Swiss ecological scarcity (eco-points 2006) was finalized in 2008. With the help of the project management and experts from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) and members of the Swiss association of environmentally conscious business (öbu), we were able to substantially improve the applicability and flexibility of the methodological concept and to update the eco-factors to the actual state of the environment and environmental legislation. Furthermore, the method was extended to key environmental impacts such as water scarcity. The ecological scarcity method was the first end-point impact assessment method including water footprint. The actual publication describes the derivation of  eco-factors taking into account actual emissions and resource uses on one hand as well as Swiss political goals and internationally agreed emission targets supported by Switzerland on the other.

treeze Ltd. was contracted to establish the next update with the reference year 2011, which will be published in 2013.

The ecological scarcity method weights environmental impacts - pollutant emissions and resource consumption - by applying "eco-factors". The eco-factor of a substance is derived from environmental law or corresponding political targets. The more the current level of emissions or consumption of resources exceeds the environmental protection target set, the greater the eco-factor becomes, expressed in eco-points (EP). An eco-factor is essentially derived from three elements (in accordance with ISO Standard 14044): characterisation, normalisation and weighting. Characterisation captures the relative harmfulness of a pollutant emission or resource extraction vis-à-vis a reference substance within a given impact category (global warming potential, acidification potential, radioactivity etc.). Normalisation quantifies the contribution of a unit of pollutant or resource use to the total current load/pressure in a region (in this case the whole of Switzerland) per year. Weighting expresses the relationship between the current pollutant emission or resource consumption (current flow) and the politically deterimed emission or consumption target (critical flow). The eco-factors established with this approach are then multiplied with the cumulative emissions and resource uses calculated in the life cycle inventory analysis. The method may be used for product comparisons, for process and product improvements, for the assessment of total environmental impacts of production sites or of the final consumption in a country.

The method is used in the Biofuels Life Cycle Assessment Ordinance and has first been used in an LCA of several biofuel options in Switzerland. An article in Science referred to this application as a new ground breaking option. Based on this application the verification procedure for tax exemption of biofuels has been developed. Most LCA practitioners in Switzerland use the ecological scacrity method in at least some of their studies.

There is a rising international interest in the application and development of the ecological scarcity approach. We developed ecological scarcity Japan in the framework of a biofuels research programme. Adaptations to other countries such as Jordan are available too. A German research institute recommended the ecological scarcity method as a basis for a national life cycle impact assessment method. Volkswagen and DaimlerCrysler use this approach in the environmental reporting of their production facilities. An LCA case study on beverage cups made from fossil and bio-plastics to be used during the EURO 2008 was comissioned by a group of cities and national authorities from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The European research institute DG-JRC in Ispra recommends the ecological scarcity approach for the assessment of water use and radioactive emissions as mid-point indicators in LCIA. The study has been carried out by leading European LCIA experts.