Life cycle sustainability assessment: An ongoing journey

Zanni, Sara; Awere, Eric; Bonoli, Alessandra

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-818355-7.00004-x

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…As a third group, studies have used empirical data from social LCA databases to assess the social sustainability of energy technologies [30]. While for the latter group, data on the social sustainability performances is criticized for its methodological shortcomings and the resulting lack of reliability and validity [30][31][32]. With regard to the first two groups of contributions, we observe a clear dichotomy: Within the first group of contributions, social sustainability is understood as a purely normative function, i.e.…”

Section: Sustainability Of Energy Systems: Concepts and Methodologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging the Gap: An Empirical Approach to Studying the Social Sustainability of Future Energy Systems

Schmidt-Scheele

Hauser

Scheel

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Background: Given the multitude of scenarios on the future of our energy systems, multi-criteria assessments are increasingly called for to analyze and anticipate long-term effects of possible pathways with regards to their environmental, economic and social sustainability. While economic and ecologic indicators are covered through energy systems modelling and life cycle sustainability assessments, approaches to the social sustainability of future energy systems remain methodologically under-developed. Previous studies have either focused only on the social acceptance of single energy technologies or used expert-based environmental and economic indicators with social implications. Approach and results: We argue that in order to gather empirical insights on the social sustainability of future energy systems and to integrate it in multi-criteria assessments, citizens’ preferences and values need to be more systematically analyzed while informing their decisions more transparently with full life cycle data. Given the lack of theoretical underpinnings of sustainability and of empirical insights into citizens’ perceptions of sustainability with respect to future energy systems, we further argue that an explorative research design is needed. Therefore, next to six focus groups, we conducted a discrete choice experiment. The method is currently becoming more popular to analyze individuals’ preference structures for energy technologies or investments. As we show in our paper, it can be fruitfully applied to study the values and trade-offs of citizens with regards to sustainability issues. Our combined empirical methods provide two main insights with strong implications for the future development and assessment of energy pathways: While environmental and climate-related effects significantly influenced citizens’ preferences for or against certain energy pathways, total systems and production costs were of far less importance to citizens than the public discourse suggests. Conclusions: Our findings are contrary to the focus of many scenario studies that seek to optimize pathways according to total systems costs. The role of fairness and distributional justice in transition processes featured as a dominant theme in all focus groups. This adds central dimensions for future multi-criteria assessments that, so far, have been neglected by current energy systems models.

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Section: Sustainability Of Energy Systems: Concepts and Methodologiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging the Gap: An Empirical Approach to Studying the Social Sustainability of Future Energy Systems

Schmidt-Scheele

Hauser

Scheel

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…It allows maximizing results, evaluation of costs, benefits, and combination of designs [40], providing greater inclusion of practices in the process, advancing more toward efficiency than only mitigating impacts. This is why beyond including a social and economic life cycle [44], to complement a focus on sustainable totality, the limits of improvement toward efficiency, innovation, decision, and compliance with circular economy must be addressed, where the inspiration in nature can provide opportunities. Hence the following section shows an analysis of the literature using nature as inspiration for the specific chapter topic.…”

Section: Lca Phases and Impact Assessment Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Including Nature-Based Success Measurement Criteria in the Life Cycle Assessment

Miguel¹,

Beermann²

2023

Life Cycle Assessment - Recent Advances and New Perspectives

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Conventional life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product’s life or process. Such impacts along the product life or process are assessed via criteria to establish success when accounting for resource intake, waste, and emissions fluxes. In most cases, the assessment range may vary, defined by the designer’s and product’s aims, failing to evaluate all parts of the said cycle completely. This before is said to follow the “reducing unsustainability” paradigm (RUP), and changes are needed toward an assessment based on the “achieving sustainability” paradigm (ASP). Thus, this chapter embarks on the search for assessment approaches, assuming biomimicry principles can improve current LCIA tools. Comprehending the LCA criteria to assess product or process impacts is done via a literature review. Results showed that most assessment tools continue to be developed under the RUP, where three approaches present great potential for an ASP. A discussion over the difference in assessing two case studies in the built environment, net-zero-energy buildings, and sustainable construction projects under both paradigms is presented.

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“…The LCA is an instrument based on an environmental consideration that monitors and restricts the destructive environmental effects of a product's entire life cycle in the supply chain with specific standards [54,56,57]. Based on such instruments, other completed assessment codes and procedures, like: PLCA (product life cycle assessment) [58], SLCA (social life cycle assessment) [59] and LCSA (life cycle sustainability assessment) [58,60], are proposed by different organizations [61].…”

Section: Data Governance In Supply Chainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Data Lake Governance: Towards a Systemic and Natural Ecosystem Analogy

Derakhshannia

Gervet²,

Hajj-Hassan³

et al. 2020

Future Internet

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The realm of big data has brought new venues for knowledge acquisition, but also major challenges including data interoperability and effective management. The great volume of miscellaneous data renders the generation of new knowledge a complex data analysis process. Presently, big data technologies provide multiple solutions and tools towards the semantic analysis of heterogeneous data, including their accessibility and reusability. However, in addition to learning from data, we are faced with the issue of data storage and management in a cost-effective and reliable manner. This is the core topic of this paper. A data lake, inspired by the natural lake, is a centralized data repository that stores all kinds of data in any format and structure. This allows any type of data to be ingested into the data lake without any restriction or normalization. This could lead to a critical problem known as data swamp, which can contain invalid or incoherent data that adds no values for further knowledge acquisition. To deal with the potential avalanche of data, some legislation is required to turn such heterogeneous datasets into manageable data. In this article, we address this problem and propose some solutions concerning innovative methods, derived from a multidisciplinary science perspective to manage data lake. The proposed methods imitate the supply chain management and natural lake principles with an emphasis on the importance of the data life cycle, to implement responsible data governance for the data lake.

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Life cycle sustainability assessment: An ongoing journey

Cited by 11 publications

References 63 publications

Bridging the Gap: An Empirical Approach to Studying the Social Sustainability of Future Energy Systems

Bridging the Gap: An Empirical Approach to Studying the Social Sustainability of Future Energy Systems

Including Nature-Based Success Measurement Criteria in the Life Cycle Assessment

Data Lake Governance: Towards a Systemic and Natural Ecosystem Analogy

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