Development of IDEA Regionalized type

Background and purpose of developing IDEA Regionalized type
Since IDEA mainly calculates the environmental impact of products and services in Japan, it is not suitable to evaluate economic activity outside of Japan. Even for the same product, the environmental impact of production (use of energy and raw materials), use and disposal stages of the product differ significantly between Japan and other countries. To account for these differences when providing background data for LCA, a country-specific background database must be created that reflects the actual situation in the country where raw materials are procured and where factories are located. Following figure shows a comparison of CO2 emissions between Japan and China. CO2 emissions of electricity, water supply and industrial water are different in two countries.

LCI databases are being created in most developed countries and emerging countries. However, in developing countries, the construction of LCI databases is lagging, and it will take time for them to be completed.
Under these circumstances, a complete set of unit process datasets for all products in all countries will not be available for a long time. And it would take an enormous amount of effort to create the missing unit process datasets by researching all production processes in all countries.

Therefore, we believe that the best solution now is to estimate unit process datasets for the global average and specific countries with the highest possible accuracy based on IDEA, which contains unit process datasets for all products produced in Japan. This is the approach we have used in creating IDEA Regionalized type as background database.

IDEA Regionalized type can be used for LCA studies in the global average, some target countries and Japan. It is also useful for Japanese LCA studies that need more accurate data on the countries Japan procures raw materials from, as well as Japanese companies that have factories located in those countries.

Construction methods of IDEA Regionalized type
IDEA Regionalized type is developed by modifying the datasets in IDEA. We use a set of standard methods to modify the input and output of intermediate flows of each unit process dataset to reflect the situation in the global average and other countries. In the current version of IDEA Regionalized type, we modify the following three factors of intermediate flows shown in the figure below.

For the datasets for each country not including Japan in IDEA Ver.3.3 Regionalized type, the production of import products is not covered. It only covers the domestic production and the import products are not in the scope.

Developing status of IDEA Regionalized type
The first IDEA Regionalized type was created based on IDEA Ver.2 and released in May 2020. The database of IDEA Ver.2 Regionalized type was created for the global average (GLO), Japan (JPN), and 12 other countries.

In November 2022, IDEA Ver.3.2 Regionalized type was released, with databases for the global average (GLO), Japan (JPN), and two other countries: China (CHN) and Indonesia (IDN).

In December 2023, the Japanese version of IDEA Ver.3.3 Regionalized type was released, and its English version is being released in February 2024. We created the database for the global average (GLO), Japan (JPN), and 18 other countries. The data stored in IDEA Regionalized type is shown in the table below.