Implementation of regionalized AWARE calculations

[cmutel]

Feature request

AWARE is a method for determining how bad water use is in different locations around the globe. AWARE provides "characterization factors" per watershed, but out initial implementation will be on the spatial scale of our inventory data, i.e. countries or economic units. This means that our inventory and impact assessment with have a shared spatial scale.

We are primarily importing data from systems which have a linked "flow-location" data model - in other words, they would have a resource consumption item of "Surface water in Colombia". Brightway has a strict assumption that these so-called "elementary flows" do not have a location - rather, they occur in the location of the process consuming or emitting them. So we would need to change our model from:

flowchart LR
    id1(["Water, surface, CO"]) --> id2[Process A]

Loading

To:

flowchart LR
   id0(["Water, surface"]) --> id1["Water consumption, surface"] --> id2[Process A]

Loading

Where the process node Water consumption, surface has {"location": "CO"}.

Tasks:

• Modify bw_simapro_csv and bw2io to create proxy nodes for water consumption in each region. Make sure that proxy nodes are reused if two processes consume water in the same location.
• Copy OneSpatialScaleLCA from bw2regional into Activity Browser code, or make GIS dependencies of bw2regional optional. We won't be able to include the complete GIS software stack in the AB and package it successfully within our current project.
• Import the provided export of AWARE, and test global and some region-specific characterization factors.
• Test implementation against known good results.
• User acceptance