Background
- Efforts to promote sustainable development must take account of people (e.g. location and age, living conditions, ambitions and opportunities)
- Key international declarations emerging from Rio 1992 emphasized: human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development
- Human-centered focus is reflected in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
- …and is still a focus of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), adopted in Sept 2015
Social Sustainability
- Social sustainability is one aspect of sustainability or sustainable development:
– encompasses human rights, labour rights and corporate governance - Future generations should have
– the same or greater access to social resources
as the current generation (“inter-generational equity”)
– equal access to social resources within
the current generation
(“intra-generational equity”)
Bringing Social Impacts into LCA
- UNEP SETAC Task Force Phase started in 2004
– Literature study
– Case Studies
– Feasibility study - 2009: publication of the Guidelines (2006-2009)
- 2013: publication of the final versions
of the Methodological Sheets - 2017 - 2020: revision of the Guidelines
and publication in 2020 - 2021: publication of the revised Methodological
Sheets
Social LCA Guidelines
Aim is to integrate social aspects into sustainability assessment to cover all three pillars of sustainability in the assessment:
Why?
* Company’s responsibility (e.g. do not want to be linked to ‘child labor’ or ‘corruption’, neither within their organization, nor in their supply chain)
* Consumer wants to know which social impacts the product carries
* Public authorities need to apply the integrated product policy in place, for example for their public procurement, etc.
Which guideline exist?
UNEP/SETAC Guidelines for S-LCA of Products
and Organizations
This 2020 publication provides an updated directive for the practice of S-LCA closely following the LCA methodology
What are Social Impacts?
Social impacts - consequences of positive and negative
pressures on social endpoints (i.e. well-being of stakeholders).
Classification of the social impact can
be twofold:
* acc. to impact categories
* acc. to stakeholder categories,
which represent all social groups
affected during the production and
consumption process
What is S-LCA?
- S-LCA is a methodology to assess the social impacts of products and services across their life cycle and provides information on social and socio-economic
aspects for decision-making to improve the social performance of an organization and the well-being of stakeholders - The S-LCA Guidelines “provide a roadmap, a body of knowledge, and light to assist in the journey of stakeholders engaging in the assessment of social and
socio-economic impacts of products life cycle” - S-LCA follows the same four phases as environmental LCA in an iterative process
Social Handprinting: Positive Impacts
- First time that Positive Impacts are proactively mentioned throughout the
Guidelines! - Positive impacts are benefits from the product life cycle that make a positive contribution to the improvement of human well-being, i.e. beneficial impacts
(as opposed to negative impacts being detrimental) - They can be assessed by looking at positive effects experienced by affected stakeholders or through potentially positive proxies, such as positive social
performance or social impacts - 3 Type of Positive Impacts
– Type A: Positive social performance going beyond business as usual
– Type B: Positive social impact through presence
– Type C: Positive social impact through product utility
Conducting an S-LCA Study
like LCA:
- Definition of Goal & Scope
- Inventory Analysis
- Impact Assessment
- Interpretation
Goal & Scope (G&S)
- Purpose, object, and methodological framework are
determined in this phase - Strongly encouraged to have participation of
stakeholders in the G&S development process - Goal – Why is the study being conducted? Who is the
target audience? What do you want to assess? Is it
intended to support decision-making? - Scope – clarifies the object of the study and
determines its methodological framework
– Functional unit
– Reference flow
– Product system
– System boundaries
– Activity variables
− Stakeholders
− Type of impact assessment method
− Data collection strategies
− Data quality requirements
− Allocation procedures
− Interpretation planned
− Assumptions and value choices
− Limitations
S-LCA guidelines: assessment framework
6 stakeholder groups & 40 subcategories
6: Worker, value chain actors, society, local community, consumers, children
–> Classification is not an either/or decision but a complementary one
Functional unit (FU)
- Function = what is offered by the investigated product or service in measurable terms
- FU = defines quantitatively the object of the study
Reference flow
- measure of the outputs from processes in a product system required to fulfil the FU
Translates the abstract FU into specific product flow
Starting point for building the product system model
Provides a reference for the „weight“ of the different enterprises in the supply chain
Goal & Scope ‒ Functional Unit & Reference Flow
LCA:
* In LCA indicators/impacts (e.g. CO2 emissions) can be easily referred to a functional unit (e.g. Y kg CO2 per T-Shirt) and aggregated over the life cycle
* Reason: environmental aspects can directly be related to processes/products S-LCA
S-LCA:
* In S-LCA, In LCA indicators/impacts (e.g. number of children working…) CANNOT be easily referred to a functional unit, e.g. 1 T-Shirt, and cannot easily be aggregated over the life cycle
* Reason:
– Data and indicators is often qualitative and semi-quantitative
– Social aspects result from the behavior of a company rather than from a product
Challenge 1: Relating indicators and impacts to the functional unit!
Social Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
- Phase of a S-LCA where
– data is collected
– LCI results obtained - Operational steps:
– Define location of the processes (country, region) and when possible, the organisations which are involved
– Screening data collection, using generic data, hotspots assessment
– Specific data collection
– Validation of a data
– Relating data to functional unit and unit process (when applicable)
– etc.
Social Life Cycle Inventory (Data Collection) - hotspot assessment
Hotspot identification as a prioritization tool to identify in which areas of the product supply chains we should dig deeper
Example: Social Hotspot database (since 2009)
→ Provides information on sector and/or country level regarding the risk or opportunity that a social aspect occurs
Social Life Cycle Inventory – Challenges of Data Collection
- LCA:
– Databases for generic data on relevant inputs/outputs are available
– Useful, because impacts are usually a result of the processes - SLCA:
– Databases are lacking (or show risks only)
– Impacts are more a result of the conduct of the company…
– Site specific data collection is ideally needed
UNEP/SETAC/LCI Methodological Sheets
- Available for each of the 6 stakeholder group
- Provide more guidance on how to conduct a S-LCA,
i.e. how to assess the 40 subcategories
Example – Local community - Respect of Indigenous Rights - Limitations
Two main problems:
(1) Good data sources are lacking and most often come from NGO reports
(2) There is a limited awareness on the organizations’ level
– That then often lead to negligence of the matter
– Furthermore, violations of indigenous rights in most case occur at the far up- or downstream ends of supply chains and remain unseen from an organization’s
perspective
Impact Assessment
2 types:
1. If a practitioner aims to describe a product system, with a focus on its social performance, he/she will use the
–> Reference Scale Approach.
- If a practitioner aims to predict the consequences of the product system, with an emphasis on assessing longer-term potential social impacts, he/she will use the
–> Impact Pathway Approach.
- The two methods have not had the same history of development and are not at the same level development and implementation
- The Reference Scale approach is relatively young but is perational with numerous case studies
- Impact Pathway studies chiefly pertain to the field of research, but several documented pathways are now available and applicable
Impact Assessment
Many authors suggest to stayat the subcategory level
More transparent
Aspect, where action can be taken.
Impact Assessment: Reference Scale Approach
- Reference scales are ordinal scales, typically comprised of 1 to 5 levels where each level corresponds to a performance reference point (PRP)
- Reference scales are developed by selecting performance indicators (PIs) for each position (or PRP) on the reference scale.
- The PIs are quantitative or qualitative markers of performance that underlie each of the PRPs comprised in the reference scale
- Ascending Reference Scales: e.g. from -2 to +2
- Descending Scale: very low risk / very high risk
Impact Assessment: Aggregation and Weighting
- Can occur at many points in the impact assessment phase
- Can be applied to aggregate indicators into social subcategories but also to produce a set of stakeholders’ level performances, aggregate subcategory results into impact categories or to a single overall score
- It is recommended to not aggregate positive and negative impacts because impacts occur on the level of individuals or groups of individuals and, thus, positive impacts do not make up for negative ones
- Aggregation of results should always be done very carefully to avoid misinterpretation and loss of context
- Weights represent the assignment of the relative importance (or contribution) of each indicator to the performance of a specific impact subcategory
- When weights are not defined or have the same value, all indicators are assumed to have equal relevance
Impact Assessment: Impact Pathway Approach
- Based on social mechanisms
- Belongs to a certain impact (sub)category
- Do not have a strong focus on stakeholder groups unlike the RS approach
- Give general measures/values for selected social consequences through midpoint and/or endpoint indicators
Challenge 3: Lack of application of characterization models and impact pathways and development of new ones
Qualitative Pathways:
- combine finding of different disciplines of social and natural science
- finding contribute to explanation of social interrelations
Quantitative Pathway:
- following mechanistic modelling approach oriented on E-LCIA (e.g. human health by DALY)
- following regression-based modelling approach on the basis of economic regression modelling
