Purpose
To estimate life cycle impacts from introducing the yield-enhancing inoculant containing the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Bradyrhizobium japonicum and the signal molecule lipochitooligosaccharide (LCO) in Argentinian soybean production. The study focuses on soybeans grown in rotation with corn in the Buenos Aires province. We also provide the life cycle impact assessment for the inoculant production. The study represents a novel scope in terms of the studied crop, inoculant type, and location.
Methods
Consequential LCA is used to assess the cradle-to-gate soybean production systems with and without inoculant use. Stepwise is used for quantification of 16 impacts at mid-point level. Also, the LCA-based guidance of Kløverpris et al. (2020) is followed, and we divide the change in impacts caused by the inoculant’s use into four effects. The field effect accounts for changes in field emissions. The yield effect accounts for additional soybean production in the inoculant system that displaces soybean production elsewhere (system expansion). The upstream effect covers the inoculant production and the downstream effect covers post-harvest changes such as soybean transport and drying. Small plot field-trials data is applied in the biogeochemical model DayCent to estimate field emissions, among others.
Results and discussion
The use of this inoculant reduces environmental impacts from soybean production in all studied impact categories. The main contributing factor is the yield effect, i.e., reduced impacts via avoided soybean production elsewhere including reduced pressure on land and thereby avoided impacts in the form of indirect land-use-change (iLUC). The field effect is the second-largest contributor to the overall impact reduction. Upstream and downstream effects only had minor influence on results. The yield and field effects are closely tied to the yield change from the inoculant use, which was not fully captured in the DayCent modeling. Thereby, a potential underestimation of the environmental benefits of roughly 10% can be expected, corresponding to the difference of empiric yield data and the modeled yield data in DayCent.
Conclusion and recommendations
The use of this inoculant shows environmental benefits and no trade-offs for the 16 impacts assessed. Results depend primarily on avoided soybean production (the yield effect) which entails iLUC impacts in Brazil and USA, and to a lesser degree on field emissions modelled with DayCent. Better data and parametrization of DayCent, to better capture the change in yields and estimate field emissions, economic modelling for the system expansion assumptions, and accounting for uncertainty in iLUC modelling could improve the assessment.
Purpose
Following some years of practical application, some weaknesses has been identified in the original 2018 version of the ‘social footprint’ methodology, where wellbeing was seen as exclusively related to consumption activities and as inseparably linked to production through the budget constraint, implying that the value of wellbeing was limited to be a mirror of the value of production. Several improvements in both methodology and data are presented here.
Methods
The theoretical improvements are inspired by the suggestion of Juster et al. (1981) that wellbeing can be seen as the sum of the value added generated from work and the intrinsic activity benefits, i.e., the positive affect from performing or taking part in specific work or leisure activities. This implies a relatively low preference for income relative to intrinsic activity benefits, which is confirmed by recent findings of subjective wellbeing research.
Results and discussion
Other findings of subjective wellbeing research provide a constraint on the conversion factor between Disability-Adjusted Life-Years (DALY) and Quality-Adjusted person-Life-Years (QALY), leading to a surprising 0.3 QALY/DALY, against the more intuitive 1 QALY/DALY. These theoretical improvements, combined with the availability of more recent country-specific data on impacts on wellbeing, allows to calculate a global potential level of wellbeing of 0.958 QALY/person-life-year, replacing the global potential productivity of the 2018 version of the ‘social footprint’ methodology. The new country-specific data allows the valuation of impacts on wellbeing to be assessed separately from the valuation of inequality, the latter now done with equity-weights relative to country-specific average income baselines, rather than to the global baseline used in the 2018 version.
Conclusion
The new data confirm the dominating role of impacts of missing governance, now quantified at 78% of all sustainability impacts, which was the original motivation and rationale behind the 2018 version of the ‘social footprint’ methodology.
SharedIt link: https://rdcu.be/c0Gw0
The current practice for assessing the environmental life cycle impacts of a product system is limited to the activities that respond directly to a change in demand. The revenue resulting from this change in demand is then used to pay for primary factors, such as wages and taxes, while the redistribution of that money is left outside the system boundaries. The aim of this paper is to address this limitation by providing a method in which the second order effects, i.e., the effects of re-spending that money, are included. For that, an income distribution model based on a simplified stock-flow consistent framework was developed. The method is applied in a closed economy consisting of six industries, banks and three household income groups. The dynamics of the income redistribution effects are studied throughout the rounds of (re)distribution, showing that the perturbation has a permanent effect on the economy, from environmental and social perspectives, and major changes occur in the first period of distribution. In addition, the paper also provides insights on the next steps for developing a full-scale model and discussions on the relationship between income distribution and productivity growth.
This file provides the necessary impact data, links to SDG indicators, and a 2022 update of the Social Footprint method. The file also includes instructions for software implementation and guidance for performing a quantitative life cycle sustainability impact assessment, applying an impact pathway framework that links pressures from human activities via cause-effect chains to their impact on sustainable wellbeing.
The unique contribution of the current method is the use of sustainable wellbeing (utility, measured in Quality-Adjusted person-Life-Years, QALY) as a comprehensive summary indicator for all social, ecosystem and economic impacts. This allows to quantify trade-offs and synergies between impact categories, to compare business decisions, performance, and improvement options across industry sectors. By applying the exhaustive ‘capitals’ approach to defining the Areas of Protection, the method ensures comprehensiveness in terms the set of impact categories covered.
Data is in the form of a Zip file (27.4MB)
Around 40% of global raw materials that are extracted every year accumulate as in-use stocks in the form of buildings, infrastructure, transport equipment, and other durable goods. Material inflows to in-use stocks are a key component in the circularity transition, since the reintegration of those materials back into the economy, at the end of the stock's life cycle, means that less extraction of raw materials is required. Thus, understanding the geographical, material, and sectoral distribution of material inflows to in-use stocks globally is crucial for circular economy policies. Here we quantify the geographical, material, and sectoral distributions of material inflows to in-use stocks of 43 countries and 5 rest-of-the-world regions in 2011, using the global, multiregional hybrid units input–output database EXIOBASE v3.3. Among all regions considered, China shows the largest amount of material added to in-use stocks in 2011 (around 46% of global material inflows to in-use stocks), with a per capita value that is comparable to high income regions such as Europe and North America. In these latter regions, more than 90% of in-use stock additions are comprised of non-metallic minerals (e.g., concrete, brick/stone, asphalt, and aggregates) and steel. We discuss the importance of understanding the distribution and composition of materials accumulated in society for a circularity transition. We also argue that future research should integrate the geographical and material resolution of our results into dynamic stock-flow models to determine when these materials will be available for recovery and recycling.
This article met the requirements for a Gold-Gold JIE data openness badge described in http://jie.click/badges
This paper shows an extended version of the hybrid multiregional Input-Output table (MR-HIOT) derived from Exiobase v.3.
The multi-regional hybrid supply-use tables (MR-HSUTs), which are used to derive the input-output tables where tangible goods are accounted in metric tons, energy flows in TJ and services in euros. They respect mass, energy and monetary balances.
The extensions include emissions, stock addition, stock reduction/depletion, supply and use of waste, supply and use of packaging, extraction of resources, use and withdrawal of water and land use.
The MR-HIOT here presented adopts a generalized version of by-product technology model (Stone’s method). Furthermore, a cause-effect based electricity model and indirect land use change (iLUC) model are inserted.
The generalized by-product technology model extends the Stone’s method to a a multi-regional framework and focuses on the respect of mass balance, whenever by-products substitute products with different properties produced elsewhere as principal productions.
The electricity model introduces the concept of national electricity grid where only non-constrained and competitive producers react to changes in demand. The electricity model was introduced by Schmidt et al (2011).
The iLUC model considers the substitution effects of the land use. The model was introduced by Schmidt et al. (2015). It simulates the effect of the substitution of land anytime a new production comes into place in any region of the world. Depending on the peculiarities of a country, the new demand of land may be obtained either by intensification the crops or occupying new land, i.e. forest or grassland. The emissions due to intensification and land use changes are taken into account.
The transaction matrix presented in this paper has a format 8213x8213; 164 products for 48 countries/world regions, 48 national electricity markets, six types of national land use markets for each of the 48 regions, and 5 world land use markets.
Modeling the use or the supply of recycled materials in a product-oriented Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is challenging and a step in LCA that is typically associated with diverging practices and outcomes. In the ambition to harmonize LCA practices and increase the comparability of studies, the European Commission published the Product Environmental Footprint Guide, with the Circular Footprint Formula to model recycling. The formula considers the market situation of recycled materials, which is consistent with a consequential LCA perspective. Therefore, this paper evaluates the extent to which the Circular Footprint Formula follows a consequential LCA approach. To evaluate this, the considered consequential approach is first systematized in the form of a Causal Loop Diagram that shows the relevant parameters and their relationships. From the diagram, a formula is extracted in the same style of the Circular Footprint Formula, enabling comparison. It is concluded that the Circular Footprint Formula has the potential to, but at the moment does not, provide a full consequential approach. Main discrepancies between the Circular Footprint Formula and consequential LCA are 1) the lack of including the marginal suppliers and marginal users of materials instead of average or specific suppliers and users in the life cycle under study, 2) predetermined limitations of the extent to which substitutions can be modeled, and 3) an incomplete modeling of the effects of recycling when demand is constrained. A few inconsistencies were identified that merit to be corrected in an updated version of the Circular Footprint Formula. It is acknowledged that the Circular Footprint Formula does not claim to be consequential. However, alignment of the method with a clear LCA objective – such as a reduction of environmental impacts – could enable the production of LCA results that better inform decisions of companies, consumers, and policymakers.
Environmental policies often underperform due to so-called rebound effects, namely behavioural and systemic responses to technical change leading to additional consumption and environmental damage. While evidence of rebound is abundant, studies generally focus on technical changes that are neither associated with specific technologies nor their production costs, making it difficult to connect these changes with the policies governing them. To overcome this limitation, this study proposes to combine a technology-rich model based on life cycle assessment and a behaviour-optimising model for the global economy based on computable general equilibrium modelling. This approach allows to quantify policy-induced economy-wide rebound effects for four relevant environmental impacts: climate change, acidification, photochemical ozone formation, and particulate matter. We apply this approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the United Kingdom’s subsidy on electric cars. The results show notable economy-wide rebound effects associated with this subsidy: over or close to 100% (no environmental benefits) for acidification and particulate matter impacts, and a lower, yet notable, magnitude for climate change (~20–50%) and photochemical ozone formation (~30–80%) impacts. The results also show the important role of macro-economic effects from price changes, particularly how the shift from petrol to electricity triggered additional demand for cheaper petrol.
Environmental input–output analyses can be a useful decision support tool at the subnational level, because of its ability to capture economic and environmental impacts at other geographical levels. Yet, such analyses are hindered by the lack of subnational IO tables. Furthermore, the lack of physical product and waste flows in what is known as a “hybrid” table prevents a range of consumption-based and circular-economy-type analyses. We demonstrate the development of a multiregional hybrid IOT (MRHIOT) along with environmental extensions at the subnational level and exemplify it for the case of Belgium. The development procedure discloses a novel approach of combining national hybrid tables, subnational monetary tables, and physical survey-based data. Such a combination builds upon a partial-survey approach that includes a range of techniques for initial estimation and reconciliation within a balancing procedure. For the validation of the approaches, we assessed the magnitude of deviations between the initial and final estimates and analyzed the uncertainties inherent to each initial estimation procedure. Subsequently, we conducted a consumption-based analysis where we assessed the carbon footprint (CF) at the subnational level and highlighted the CF inherent to the interregional linkages. This study provides methodological and application-based contributions to the discussion on the relevance of hybrid subnational tables and analyses compared to national ones. The proposed approach could be replicable to some extent for further developing subnational MRHIOT. The study is expected to foster more research toward the development of further subnational MRHIOT as well as its associated wide-ranging applications.
