Remembering Kiyotada Hayashi
Tribute to the researcher, mentor, and friend whose pursuit of more sustainable agriculture, and whose singular way of seeing the world, continues to shape our work and the wider LCA community.
by Lise Laurin, CEO & Founder
It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of our colleague and friend, Dr. Kiyotada Hayashi who passed away on September 20, 2026, while traveling in Indonesia. Kiyotada was a driving force behind efforts to make agriculture more sustainable, particularly in Japan, and to the EarthShift Global team he was an inspiration, a mentor, and a friend.
Throughout his career, Kiyotada searched for better ways to model and assess agricultural systems, always with one goal in mind: giving decision-makers robust, trustworthy evidence to act on.
Prior to joining EarthShift Global, Kiyotada spent 17 years at Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Organization (NARO) where he devoted himself to this work. Alongside decision support, he advanced the much-needed understanding of how land-use change affects biodiversity. He also played a prominent role in a series of studies for Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on the best uses of biomass, bringing together researchers from around the world to inform those decisions.
It was through those projects that I first had the privilege of working with Kiyotada. He saw the promise of Sustainable Return on Investment (S-ROI) and Total Cost Assessment (TCA) and he afforded us the opportunity to apply them to our four biomass projects in Japan. With his support, we not only identified the benefits (and risks) of many of those projects, but also advanced the methodology itself and the ways we share results. I will always be grateful for that opportunity and for the generous, one-of-a-kind and unique mentorship he offered along the way.
At EarthShift Global, Kiyotada brought his deep agricultural experience and perspective to our agricultural related studies, broadening the knowledge of everyone around him. He challenged us to look at even ordinary things differently, to see the world through a different lens. Those challenges have stayed with us. They opened new ways of thinking that continue to shape our work and that we hope will lead, as he hoped, to better ways of assessing agricultural systems and our world.
His influence reached far beyond our team. With more than 70 articles and a book on agricultural decision analysis, Kiyotada’s contributions were both broad and lasting. In 2025, he joined fellow researchers in publishing a paper setting out what the LCA community still needs to achieve truly robust studies, a roadmap that remains as relevant as ever.
He was a familiar and valued presence at LCA conferences. He served for many years on the organizing committee of the LCA Food conference, contributed regularly to the annual meetings of the LCA Society of Japan and the EcoBalance conference, and joined us at ACLCA when he could. Whether presenting or listening, he was always searching for fresh ideas to bring back to his own work.
Kiyotada gave to our community in every way he could. We mourn him deeply and miss him already. Yet his curiosity, his commitment to helping people make the best possible decisions, and his singular perspective remain with us: in the work he shaped, the colleagues he mentored, and the questions he taught us to ask. The world is a better place because he was in it, and it will remain so because of all he left behind.