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 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 LCSA 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.
The project builds on and extends the 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 of the project (9 min video on youtube): https://youtu.be/z8P6O5hP1rA
The project deliverables include:
Project members have early access to project deliverables. See below for deliverables that have already become open access.
The early development work was partly funded by the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative as part of the project “Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life cycle impact pathway frameworks” and the EU Horizon project HyperCOG under grant agreement No.869886.
For subscription (or questions), please contact us. To go to the club click here.
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
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
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)
“Relative importance of sustainability impact pathways – A first rough assessment” provides guidance to focus the data collection and the development of further precision and accuracy of indicators and characterisation factors (linking the quantified impacts to their quantified causes) on the impact pathways that are of particularly high relative importance. This top-down assessment of importance is done by using Quality-Adjusted person-Life-Year (QALY) as a unit for sustainable wellbeing, informed by the annual UN measures of subjective wellbeing, and using the exhaustive classification of the so-called capital models as ‘Safeguard subjects’ to provide a structured and exhaustive account of the current impacts (estimated for year 2019) on each of the ‘Areas of Protection’, covering both instrumental values (productivity, value added, or income) and the intrinsic values of natural and manufactured assets, human capabilities, and social networks.
The report is prepared by Bo P. Weidema for the 2.-0 SDG Club and the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative as part of the project “Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life cycle impact pathway frameworks”.
The main objective of the LIFE-REthinkWASTE project is to endow municipalities with a “plug and play” governance scheme based on the PAYT (Pay As You Throw) and KAYT (Know As You Throw) paradigms to increase waste separation, reduce waste generation, and increase the effective recovery rates, whilst simultaneously reducing the average household waste bill. This objective will be tackled by adapting and re-addressing the waste management plans and other management/normative drivers (e.g., regulations, financial plans, and service contracts) according to a new paradigm in urban waste policy fares based on a combined approach of PAYT (supported by big data) and KAYT, and inspired by a novel social innovation approach.
A summary of the main results is available in this poster.
EU manufacturing companies are facing increasingly competitive and dynamic markets. To compete in the modern world, companies in the process industry need highly flexible manufacturing environments, capable of continuously adapting to changing conditions by means of advanced technologies and decision-making processes that take advantage of big data in real-time. Enterprises need to harness the knowledge held within their data streams to become more energy and resource-efficient while improving safety and lowering their environmental impact.
Cognitive manufacturing refers to a new manufacturing paradigm where machines are fully connected through wireless networks, monitored by sensors, and controlled by advanced computational intelligence to fine-tune product quality, optimise performance and sustainability, and reduce costs. Read more at http://www.hypercog.eu/ or at https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/869886
A video giver a overview of the goals of the project, with the various project partners explaining the visions for the project: https://vimeo.com/859690816
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
In our paper titled ‘Attributional or consequential life cycle assessment: a matter of social responsibility’ (Weidema et al., 2018), we conclude that “a consistent socially responsible decision-maker must always take responsibility for the activities in the consequential product life cycle and may additionally take responsibility for consequences of other activities in the value chain or supply chain.” Brander et al. (2019) summarise this as: “consequential LCA is essential, while attributional LCA is optional”, and present a critique of this conclusion, suggesting instead a sequential coupling of the two LCA models. In this rebuttal we point out that the arguments in Brander et al. (2019) do not directly challenge or discuss our central conclusion, and we here present further arguments in support of our conclusion.
The share link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YkSy3QCo9Uqpn
This paper presents a market-price-based method to value sub-soil resources in environmental Cost-Benefit Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment. The market price incorporates the privileged information of the market agents, explicitly or implicitly anticipating future applications of the resource, future backstop technologies, recycling potentials, the evolution of reserves and extraction costs. The market price is therefore considered as the best available integrated information reflecting the actual values of these parameters. Our method is based on the Hotelling rule and the fact that private agents discount future costs and benefits at a higher rate than society as a whole. In practice, the price of the last resource unit sold is calculated with the Hotelling rule using a market discount rate. Then, the price at depletion is retropolated with a social discount rate smaller than the market discount rate. The resulting corrected “socially optimal” price is higher than the market price. The method allows to calculate the social cost of resource exhaustion, which is applicable in Cost-Benefit Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment. The method is applied to mineral and fossil resources and the results are compared with other recent methods that seek to place a monetary value on resource depletion.
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.
