Welcome to our new webinar series, Beyond Carbon, where we widen the perspective from greenhouse gas emissions to a broader set of environmental and social impacts. This is episode 4 where we examine socio-economic impacts (such as worker health, community well-being, and social equity) analyzing how Social LCA tracks these indicators across different economic sectors.

Considering the modest use of social impacts in LCA in comparison with environmental impacts, one could expect the social dimension to be a newcomer. However, on the contrary, social impacts have been assessed in LCA since the 1990s. An explanation for the lack of attention is that the success factor of LCA, the measurability, is a lot harder to get a grip on when social indicators come into play.

Still, social and environmental sustainability are deeply intertwined and ignoring one of the dimensions could weaken the LCA decision support substantially. What do we do then about the non-linear social cause-effect chains, the lack of standardized data, and a range of other methodological complexities?

The webinar contains a 30-minute presentation by researcher Andrea Di Maria, covering the relevance, hurdles and opportunities of assessing social impacts in LCA, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A and discussions where you get to explore what the topic means in practice.

Presenter

Andrea Di Maria works as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Liege (Belgium) specializing in Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Costing, and Social LCA applied to agricultural and bio-circular systems. He has a PhD in Engineering Science and Environmental Economy from KU Leuven (Belgium), focusing on sustainability assessment methodologies to enhance circular economy, and has since built a research program spanning LCA, LCC and Social LCA across multiple EU-funded collaborative projects. Andrea Di Maria has experience applying Social LCA methodologies across diverse sectors, including construction, agriculture, and mining.

More about the subject

Di Maria, A., Di Noi, C., Román Escobar, Y., Vázquez Ruiz, A., & Ciroth, A. (2024). Synergies and challenges of bottom-up and top-down approaches for assessing social impacts in mining operation. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 1–21.

Russo Garrido, S., Parent, J., Beaulieu, L., & Revéret, J. P. (2018). A literature review of type I SLCA—making the logic underlying methodological choices explicit. International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 23(3), 432–444.

UNEP. (2020). Guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products and organizations 2020 (C. Benoît Norris, M. Traverso, S. Neugebauer, E. Ekener, T. Schaubroeck, S. Russo Garrido, M. Berger, S. Valdivia, A. Lehmann, M. Finkbeiner, & G. Arcese, Eds.).

UNEP. (2021). Methodological Sheets for Subcategories in Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) 2021 – Life Cycle Initiative.

This meeting is arranged within the project Innovation cluster for the life cycle perspective, funded by the Swedish Energy Agency and partners in Swedish Life Cycle Center.