It’s already 2020, and what a year this has been. The current pandemic has (with all its right) put a shadow on the long-term issues and problems we need to solve. The 2030 Agenda för sustainable development only have 2/3 of its time left. 5 years has passed and only 10 more years to go and there’s 169 goals to reach.
The life-cycle impact framework, also known as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), is a common tool for companies to assess environmental and social impact at a product level. With this tool you can for example see in what areas of a products life-span it has the highest climate impact. In many cases we might for example think that transportation is the major polluter, but it might be components or crops produced or grown elsewhere that has the highest impact. LCA helps designer and decision makers take evident based actions.
The global goals are not always quantitative (even though the goals has 230 indicators) and LCA is based on quantitative data. The global goals are also meant to be used at a global and national level while an LCA is for a specific product.
Despite these differences the project “Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life cycle impact pathwayframeworks” was initiated by the UN Life Cycle Initiative to create robust links between the global goals and LCA and to develop a methodology for measuring and reporting on companies’ contributions to the global goals.
The result is a tool that can help companies to understand in what ways their product might contribute to the global goals and in what state of the production line. It also helps with understanding what goals the product might harm. The scope of this measure is identified.
This tool will in 2020 and 2021 be applied on some Case Studies and based on the results improved.
I believe these kind of tools are very helpful since they take something very abstract and problematic and turn it into something useful for decision making. This can help consumers and producers to go beyond greenwashing and take evident based decisions. I’m looking forward to see the upcoming case studies and what they can teach us.