The term “social” is here understood as it is used in welfare economics, to signify an accounting that encompasses the entire societal economy, as in “social costs”, combining private costs and externalities. The “social footprint” is thus to be understood as the result of a complete “life cycle sustainability assessment” (LCSA).
The practicality of social footprinting is currently hampered by a lack of focus on materiality of the impacts, an excessive data requirement, and a lack of understanding of the main impact pathways (cause-effect relationships) for social and economic impacts.
To overcome these barriers, a practical approach to accounting and assessment is proposed, without loss of comprehensiveness.
The proposed method keeps the inventory comprehensive but directs detailed data collection towards the impacts most likely to matter. It uses global estimates to identify important, non-overlapping impact categories, then prioritises activities with high value added or many work-hours.
For impacts that are location-specific rather than driven by a company’s technology choices, the abstract proposes assessing effects at country level and allocating them to enterprises in proportion to value added. It describes income redistribution using the relative marginal utility of income, and well-being effects using the number of people affected, severity and duration expressed as Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), which may be monetised. The method is presented as a way to make broad social footprinting more practical with available generic data. It is a proposed approach, not evidence that every impact pathway is fully understood.
