Environmental Impact Assessment Review 20 (2000) 113–123 www.elsevier.com/locate/eiar EIA procedure Significance of decision-making for LCA methodology Anne-Marie Tillman* Environmental Systems Analysis, Chalmers University of Technology, S-412 96 Go ¨ teborg, Sweden Accepted 2 August 1999 Abstract Decision-making is central to life cycle assessment (LCA), both in the sense that LCA may be used as decision support and in the sense that different methodological choices in LCA are relevant to different applications. This latter issue is pursued in this paper: i.e., how the decision-making context, and thus goal definition, may be used to guide methodological choices in LCA. A distinction is made between a retrospective or accounting perspective and a prospective perspective, where the consequences of alternative actions are investigated. This has significant implications for LCA guidelines, including the standard on LCA compiled by the International Standardization Organization (ISO).  2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights re- served. Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment; Decision-making; LCA methodology; LCA applications 1. Introduction Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a systems analysis method, as indicated by the occurrence of multidisciplinarity, teleological features, the presence of large (complex) systems and handling of a systems model, and the existence of case studies and their iterative nature [1]. There are numerous purposes of LCA. The ISO 14040 standard [2] lists the following applica- tions: identification of improvement possibilities, decision-making, choice of environmental performance indicators, and market claims. Another im- portant application of LCA is that of learning—e.g., learning about environ- mental issues both in general and as associated with the product system studied and learning about the relationships of the production system stud- * Corresponding author. 0195-9255/00/$ – see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII:S0195-9255(99)00035-9