Climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – the triple planetary crisis – are increasingly threatening the Earth system, requiring tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA), which can evaluate the effectiveness of different prevention and mitigation strategies. LCA systematically quantifies environmental impacts over the entire life cycle of products, processes or policy scenarios. LCA is often used to identify environmental hotspots and prioritize actions, and is increasingly being used to assess the environmental impacts of policy implementation scenarios. (Stefanie Hellweg, Enrico Benetto, Richard Wood )