Life cycle assessment (LCA)
A method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product across its life cycle — not only carbon.
LCA is the broader discipline a carbon footprint sits inside. It models a product’s life as a system of processes and quantifies impacts across several categories: climate change, water use, acidification, eutrophication, resource depletion.
A PCF is, in effect, a single-impact LCA — climate change only. The modelling machinery is the same; the reporting is narrower.
The practical difference is data. Multi-impact assessment needs inventory databases that cover far more than greenhouse gases, and those are typically licensed. A carbon-only figure can often be produced from data a company already has.