ARIA: Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability Assessment

ARIA (Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability Assessment) is a Python package designed to streamline the calculation of environmental impacts based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. It leverages Brightway2 (Mutel, 2017) as its core infrastructure, enabling robust LCA modelling while automating several steps that traditionally require tedious manual effort. ARIA utilises large language models (LLMs) to match foreground system inputs and outputs to the appropriate background datasets based on user-defined instructions. Rather than painstakingly searching for relevant processes in LCA databases such as Ecoinvent (Wernet et al., 2016), ARIA uses LLMs to suggest possible matches and alternative search terms, making the flow mapping process faster and less prone to errors. This automation frees LCA practitioners from manual inventory selection, one of the most time consuming steps in LCA. Once activities are connected to inventory data, ARIA executes impact assessment, drawing on multiple characterisation methods available in Brightway2 to calculate environmental indicators (e.g., global warming potential, acidification, water use). It then provides convenient visualisation and plotting functionality, allowing users to quickly interpret results. Overall, ARIA offers a modular, user-friendly Python interface for LCA, integrating advanced capabilities in background inventory searching and automatic impact assessment to foster reproducible and efficient sustainability assessment. The ARIA package is open-source and available on GitHub.