Social sustainability in trade and development policy

Abstract

Purpose Social sustainability may be assessed using a variety of methods and indicators, such as the social footprint, social impact assessment, or wellbeing indices. The UNEP guidelines on social life cycle assessment (sLCA) present key elements to consider for product-level, life cycle-based social sustainability assessment. This includes guidance for the goal and scope definition, inventory, impact assessment, and interpretation phases of S-LCA. Methods for and studies of the broader scale, life cycle social dimensions of production and consumption are largely unavailable to date. The current study assesses social risks associated with trade-based consumption in EU Member States using a life cycle-based compared to a non-life cycle-based approach in order to assess the valueadded of life cycle thinking and assessment in this context. Methods Social risk refers to the potential for one or more parties to be exposed to negative social conditions that, in turn, undermine social sustainability. In order to shed light on these risks, a macro-scale analysis of the social risk profile of tradebased consumption in the EU Member States has been conducted by combining intra-and extra-territorial import statistics with country-and sector-specific social risk indicator data derived from the Social Hotspots Database. These data cover 17 social risk indicators in five thematic areas, many of which are linked with the sustainable development goals set by the recent United Nations Agenda 2030. The apparent social risk profiles of EU imports have then been assessed based on consideration of country-of-origin social risk data (non-life cycle-based approach) as compared to a life cycle-based social risk assessment which also took into account the distribution of social risk along product supply chains. The intention was to better understand how and to what extent current tradebased consumption within the EU-27 may be associated with socially unsustainable conditions domestically and abroad, and the extent to which life cycle-based consideration of social risk is necessary. Results and conclusions The analysis confirms the importance of a life cycle-based assessment of social risks in support of policies for socially sustainable production and consumption. Moreover, the methods presented herein offer a potentially powerful decision-support methodology for policy makers wishing to better understand the magnitude and distribution of social risks associated with EU production and consumption patterns, the mitigation of which will contribute to socially sustainable development.

Toward an Overall Analytical Framework for the Integrated Sustainability Assessment of the Production and Supply of Raw Materials and Primary Energy Carriers

“…Child labor, forced labor, excessive working hours, and injuries and fatalities can be considered. They can be quantified in terms of, for example, medium‐risk hours equivalents per working hour (Pelletier et al ).…”

The challenge of incorporating animal welfare in a social life cycle assessment model of European chicken production

“…In this study, animal welfare was incorporated into the Social Hotspots Database (SHDB) methodology for carrying out an S-LCA developed by Benoît-Norris et al 2012. The SHDB, built by New Earth in conjunction with an economic model derived from the Global Trade Analysis Project, is an overarching framework with a database designed to ease the data collection burden in S-LCA studies (Benoît-Norris et al 2012Pelletier et al 2018). Following this methodology, each social indicator associated with a social impact category is assigned a quantified level of risk, which is then multiplied by the amount of time associated with the functional unit (Benoît-Norris et al 2010, 2011.…”

Preface

“…The improvement of a quantitative implementation of S-LCA and its interpretation step is the aim of Traverso et al The five papers by Sousa and Cauchick Miguel (2017), Souza et al (2017), Pelletier et al (2017), Fan et al (2017), and Siebert et al (2017) pursuit the purpose of both addressing improvements of type I S-LCA and proving whether the respective S-LCA method presented is fitting in their field. Indeed, thanks to S-LCA, they seek to perform the social analysis of: product-service systems, sugarcane biotechnologies from Brazil, EU trade risks, green residential districts, or territories.…”

“…The study results pointed out the usefulness of the hybrid approach in distinguishing the social effects over different present and future sugarcane biorefinery supply chains. Pelletier et al (2017) (Social sustainability in trade and development policy) assess social risks associated with trade-based consumption in EU member states. They performed a macro-scale analysis by combining statistics with data from the Social Hotspot Database.…”