[BW2 Legacy] Using older versions of Biosphere

[marc-vdm]

Some of our users (e.g. people in LCA-ActivityBrowser/activity-browser#1137 and myself) still want (or have to) to create new projects for older versions of ecoinvent. I decided I wanted to add this functionality for AB (LCA-ActivityBrowser/activity-browser#1142)

While Ab by uses

brightway2-io/bw2io/__init__.py

Line 99 in b19fae8

def create_default_biosphere3(overwrite=False):

This doesn't allow for specifying a version of biosphere to use. I decided to try to directly call the below instead

brightway2-io/bw2io/importers/ecospold2_biosphere.py

Lines 16 to 19 in b19fae8

	class Ecospold2BiosphereImporter(LCIImporter):
	format = "Ecoinvent XML"
	def __init__(self, name="biosphere3", version="3.9"):

However, I have now found that bw2io versions are only shipped with 1 (newest) version of biosphere. While I understand that these files will take up quite some space if supplied for each version -though note that the zips take only ~300kb- , the version="3.9" argument now doesn't make sense as no other version can be chosen.

I still want to help our users install the biosphere versions they need. Do you have suggestions how I can do this with bw2io code, or should I write my own function and provide my own data through AB?

[cmutel]

@marc-vdm The data format for biosphere flows has stayed the same for quite a while. I think it one wants both ecoinvent metadata and data they should use the now built-in ecoinvent functionality; however, I think it would be fine to bundle all biosphere flow lists for 3.6+ in one zip archive (to get maximum compression), and rewrite or add to the import code.

[marc-vdm]

I think this doesn't require action anymore. I've written a solution (LCA-ActivityBrowser/activity-browser#1145) for AB for now.

Once AB supports BW25, we don't need to worry about this anymore at all right?