Economic assessments remain the dominating form of socio-economic assessment in agriculture; yet practical implementation often suffers from severe limitations. However, much of the early criticism has slowly been adopted and integrated in the form of significant improvements in the consistency and completeness of the economic assessment techniques. What remains is a better integration with the qualitative understandings developed in the social impact assessment community. This chapter is dedicated to impacts that are related to social and economic pressures, such as underpayment of labour, illegitimate resource acquisition and control, and inadequate work conditions. The author describes the development and state of the art of cost–benefit assessment and social impact assessment in agriculture (Sections 2–6) and their integration into models and tools with an economy-wide supply chain perspective (Section 7). Socio-economic impacts of agricultural development are covered in Sections 8–11. The final section considers the role of certification and fair-trade schemes.
A conceptually complete taxonomy is proposed at three levels of the impact pathway: Elementary flows, midpoint impacts, and endpoint impacts. The completeness is ensured conceptually by including unspecified residuals and by the use of fully quantifiable indicators that can be traced from source to sink, so that completeness can be verified by input-output balances and against measured totals. Each category in the taxonomy has a definition and at the lowest level also a unit of measurement. Examples of category definitions and units are illustrated in an impact pathway model with starting point in the midpoint impact category “Undernutrition”. This model also demonstrates the role of the taxonomy in the development of characterisation factors
This short report summarises the current knowledge on the interests of companies and policymakers to link the UN Sustainability Goals (the SDGs) to business needs and explores the interest in using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool to support the use of SDGs.
There has been a flurry of proposals and reports on how to bridge the gap between the "official" SDG’s and what companies can contribute. Some reports have focused on the importance and business benefits of business involvement, while others have focused on identifying the extent of current business interest and efforts. Many organisations and joint initiatives have written whitepapers that address the links between the SDG’s and existing reporting frameworks, and how to select the most relevant SDG’s. We review a few of the most interesting (in our view) in the following.
We conclude in Section 7 that there are many on-going parallel initiatives that addresses business stakeholder issues as well as gaps and needs, but none of these addresses the specific potential contributions and solutions that can be offered by linking the SDGs to life cycle impact pathway frameworks.
In Section 8 we shortly introduce our new project “Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life cycle impact pathway frameworks” that aims to overcome the identified gaps by developing a clear linkage between the visionary process that led to the creation of the SDG’s and all the science-based knowledge, data and methodology in the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment area.
The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 accompanying targets, with so far 230 indicators.
However, the 169 indicators were developed for Governments and NGO’s and not for business. For instance, none of the indicators underlying the Climate goal have business relevance, as they are focussing on policies, subsidies, etc. This means a first hurdle that needs to be taken is the re-interpretation of the indicators to link them to business and especially to decisions around product strategy and development [1].
This project provided two different tools, each with their use case:
There is a linkage between this project and the work done in our SDG club (now continued in the LCSA Club)
Available publications from the project:
Relative importance of sustainability impact pathways – A first rough assessment
Data collection guideline for pressure indicators for LCSA
Data files for Life Cycle SDG Assessment
[1] Business and Sustainable Development Commission (2017). Better Business Better World. London, January 2017. Link
The unique feature of the 2.-0 SDG framework is the use of sustainable wellbeing (utility) as a comprehensive summary indicator for all social, ecosystem and economic impacts. This indicator provides a single, quantitative endpoint for all causal impact pathways that have their starting point in the many different pressure (LCI) indicators, measurable at the level of specific production or consumption activities. Each pressure indicator is linked to the endpoint via the indicators for 169 targets of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The endpoint is expressed in units of Quality-Adjusted person-Life-Years.
The comprehensive impact pathway framework can be applied to differentiate major from minor impact pathways, to identify impact pathways that are not explicitly covered by any of the 169 sustainability targets, and to point out trade-offs and synergies between the 169 targets and their indicators. Due to the use of a single endpoint, the framework allows to quantify such trade-offs and synergies, to compare business decisions, performance and improvement options across industry sectors. Thereby, the 2.-0 SDG framework contrasts with the “cherry-picking” approach to the SDGs in current business applications. Instead, we support a rational choice of business development strategies through matching the sphere of influence of each specific business enterprise with the impact pathway framework.
The project provides estimated uncertainty ranges on each of the causal links of the impact pathways, using numerical data when possible and verbal scales when numerical data are insufficient. This also allows an identification of sustainability targets that are too vaguely formulated to allow a precise linking to the impact pathways.
The project builds on and extends impact assessment method developed by 2.-0 LCA consultants for social footprinting, which has been successfully tested for feasibility in global supply chain contexts, to support different business decisions, from single product purchases to larger policy changes, using a product life-cycle assessment approach to link specific company data to a global multi-regional input-output database with environmental and socio-economic extensions (see e.g. Schenker & Weidema 2017). The method has a low data requirement for screening purposes, and can be based exclusively on open data sources, with options for extending the level of detail when more data are available.
The project provides an actionable and rational method for businesses and governments to integrate the SDGs into decision making and monitoring, and will therefore contribute substantially to streamline and coordinate action and increase efficiency in implementing the 2030 Agenda.
Presentation for LCM 2021 on the project (14:23 min video on youtube) : https://youtu.be/zKW50rN3yzk
The project deliverables include:
Project members have early access to project deliverables. See below for deliverables that have already become open access.
Relative importance of sustainability impact pathways – A first rough assessment
Data collection guideline for pressure indicators for LCSA
Data files for Life Cycle SDG Assessment
The project themes are continued in the LCSA Club
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.
Common roots of CBA and LCA
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) share the objective to provide holistic, ex-ante assessments of human activities, and both techniques have developed from engineering practice. In spite of this common objective and the common roots, CBA and LCA have developed in relative isolation. This has resulted in a situation where much can be gained from an integration of the strong features of each technique. Such integration is now being prompted by the more widespread use of both CBA and LCA on the global arena, where also the issues of social responsibility are now in focus. Thus, it is time to sketch a common frame of understanding of environmental externalities. Such a common frame is provided by the conceptual structure of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) developed by within the SETAC/UNEP Life Cycle Initiative (Jolliet et al. 2004).
.....
Current life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodologies rarely include economic analysis—even though this element is almost always crucial to any company's decision making. This article discusses practical tools for integrating economic considerations into LCA. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Promoting sustainability means changing the future.
Recent developments in the methodology of LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) have been connected to the understanding of LCA as a tool for decision making ñ as a prospective assessment of the consequences of a choice between several substitutable product alternatives.
This implies that LCA must address the decision-making context in terms of:
• the stakeholders involved,
• issues that are important for sustainable development,
• the relevant product system (with regard to time horizon, scale, affected markets),
• secondary effects on other product systems.
This paper is devoted to discussing these demands in more detail, as compared to traditional practice.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is defined as “the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life” (Holme & Watts 2000, p. 10). Among the key issues covered by this concept are human rights, employee rights, community involvement and supplier relations. It also covers an open information policy, including issues as disclosure, transparency, consumer education and anti- corruption measures. Depending on how much emphasis is placed on supplier and consumer relations, the concept of CSR comes close to that of Ethical Trade, which can also extend throughout the value chain. Ethical trade is defined as “the array of different initiatives that seek to add social and environmental as well as financial value added through trade” (Burns & Blowfield 1999) or as a trade in which “the behaviour of the traders is regulated by a value system on which consensus has been reached through an open and rational dialogue involving all parties that are affected by the trade” (Pedersen 1991). When these concepts are extended to the entire value chain, the relationship to Life Cycle Management (Weidema 2001) becomes obvious.
