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
Slides available her: Social footprint presentation SETAC Rome. Extended abstract below.
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 present White Paper uses two elements of the Weidema (2016) methodology for social footprint (income redistribution and productivity-reducing externalities) on two case studies from Nestlé supply chains: the production of milk (liquid milk and milk powder) in Pakistan, and the production of tomato-based sauces under the Solis brand in Spain.
The practicality of social footprinting is currently hampered by an excessive data requirement, a lack of focus on materiality of the impacts, and a lack of understanding of the main impact pathways (cause-effect relationships) for social and economic impacts. We propose a “streamlined” method to overcome these barriers without loss of comprehensiveness.
The method combines a top-down approach using input-output data to focus the data collection effort on processes with high value added or a high number of work hours with a streamlined impact assessment that limits the inventory data requirement and the need for detailed impact pathway descriptions, by focusing on the macro-scale impacts of income redistribution and productivity impacts of missing governance, both of which can be classified as non-production-specific impacts, i.e., unrelated to enterprise-specific actions and choice of technology, and therefore quantifiable from national statistics without need to access detailed technology- or enterprise-specific data. The method is open for further refinement and detail in areas of specific interest for a particular product or project.
We show that non-production-specific impacts constitute the vast majority of social and economic impacts and how important income inequality is for the impact assessment. We apply a novel way of combining impacts on productivity and impacts on human well-being and show that inequality implies that an intervention that changes the amount of QALY (quality-adjusted life years) for a population group will always give a larger change in well-being than an intervention of the same monetary value that only affects the level of consumption of the same population group. Throughout the article, we apply and illustrate the method with an example from the clothing industry.
The presented method allows comprehensive assessments of social footprints of products at much lower efforts than seen so far. The potential credits for positive action is by far the largest in countries with missing governance, thus providing a compelling argument for placing activities in countries with missing governance, provided that it allows the enterprise to follow an active strategy to create shared value.
ReadIt link: http://rdcu.be/mT3r
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 first contribution was a presentation to the Life Cycle Management Workshop of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative in Johannesburg, 2002, entitled Quantifying Corporate Social Responsibility in the value chain. An important message here was the relevance of the ISO 14040-series for Social LCA a point that was iterated in a 2005 Letter to the editor entitled ISO 14044 also applies to social LCA.
The contribution to the quantification of social impacts was carried one step further in the 2005 conference presentation and the journal paper with the title The integration of economic and social aspects in life cycle impact assessment and the 2006 presentation Social impact categories, indicators, characterisation and damage modelling to the 29th Swiss LCA Discussion Forum.
As vice-chair of the UNEP/SETAC cross-cutting "Task Force on Social Aspects in LCA", Bo P. Weidema contributed to the 2006 feasibility study and the final 2009 Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products and the accompanying Methodological Sheets.
This work is currently continued in our LCSA club.
