Outline Framing Sustainable Development

Outline

• Framing Sustainable Development

• Brundland definition
• Consumption, Needs, Well-being
• Suggested alternative that people and organizations can start to apply now

• Ways Life Cycle Methods might contribute

• The essence of Life Cycle Assessment
• Impacts of development in supply chains
• Beneficience – being sustainable now

Sustainable Development

• “Meeting the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” -WCED (Brundtland Commission) 1987

Key themes in Brundtland definition

• Human needs at center

• Meeting them!
• Defining
• Well-being
• Health as a partial but powerful “barometer”
• How are needs met; how is the ability related to: * the state of the environment * abilities/patterns of consumption * other key factors

• Not compromising ability of future generations

Well-being, needs, commodities

Hedonic Well-being: Issues with Happiness

• Three components:

• Life satisfaction
• Presence of Positive mood aspects
• Absence of Negative mood aspects

• Long-term reported life satisfaction:

• More a personal characteristic than a result of situation/condition
• People reluctant to report/entertain low life satisfaction

• Short-term mood versus long-term well-being

• Actions may provide temporary pleasure while compromising long-term satisfaction of basic needs

Two Frames of Well-being

• Hedonic well-being (“happiness”)‏

• Subjective well-being
• Aristippus, Hobbes, Bentham (utilitarian)
• Diener 1984, Veenhoven, others
• Hedonic Psychology: Kahneman et al., 1999

• Eudaimonic (thriving, being-well, actualizing)‏

• Aristotle, Fromm, and many others
• Deci, Ryan, Csikszentmihalyi, others
• Evolutionary psychology; observation of human thriving; happiness, vitality, mental and psychological health

Need Satisfier classes and behavior

• Synergic: satisfy multiple needs at once (e.g., education)‏

• Singular: satisfy one need (e.g., insurance)‏

• Inhibiting: satisfy one, inhibit others (e.g., excess work)‏

• Pseudo: false sensation of satisfying, may impair (status symbols)‏

• Violators and destructors: false solution, may prevent actual solution while impairing other needs (govt. bureaucracy for security)

Max-Neef (1992): 9 Basic Needs

Meeting Needs

• Largely through actions, not things

• The ability of these actions to meet needs depends strongly on:

• Quality of relationships
• Time and attention
• Abilities

• Many of these actions which are by definition intrinsically valuable, also generate benefits for others

Briefly about the more physical needs: Jerome Segal and Societal Efficiency

• Jerome Segal (1998): “Graceful Simplicity”

• Societal Efficiency: Need satisfaction per unit of income

• The inverse of the income required to meet one’s basic needs

• The modern USA is probably the most societally inefficient civilization the world has ever seen.

Food

• Middle class standard from Segal: “A person eats nutritiously, hosts with pride, eats diverse foods of good quality, celebrates holidays, eats produce out of season, purchases lunch in the workplace, and occasionally takes the family out for dinner.”

• Based on current spending: $1715 - $2212

Shelter

• “Lives in a house or apartment with protection from the elements, with sufficient light and ventilation to sustain good health.

• “Lives in sanitary and spacial conditions not generally viewed as disgraceful.

• “Lives in a neighborhood where children can safely be outside alone.

• “Lives where there is access to good public schools.”

Current Paradigm

• Products deliver function to user

• These functions may meet basic needs to promote thriving of user, or not

• Product use generates negative impacts throughout LC

• Goal: Given the existence of the person, minimize his/her negative impacts on the world, by:

• Finding greenest products; greening lifestyles
• Making products greener

• At best, one person’s thriving is everyone else’s loss

• World would be better off without me

Reframing sustainable development

Thriving in ways that promote thriving

• Study, reduce the negative impacts of our consumption and actions

• Create enough positive benefits elsewhere in the world to more than off-set the negative impacts

• Enable innovations that reduce negative impacts

• Take actions, intrinsically valuable, which also generate benefits for others, including those which build/promote:

• Quality of relationships
• Time and attention
• Abilities

Thriving in ways that promote thriving

• Study, reduce the negative impacts of our consumption and actions

“Show me the data.”

• “Show me the data.”

• “How many grams, and how does that compare with our other impacts, like climate change?”

• “And I've been wondering about all the jar-washing by our customers...”

• “And what can we do about these issues ??”

Life Cycle Assessment

• Internationally Standardized (ISO 14040, 14044)‏

• Think broadly: Life cycle, cradle-to-next-life
• Think deeply: Impacts, endpoints
• Think quantitatively: data
• Think comparatively: what if we change xyz?
• Think systematically: standards, transparency

LCA Defined: ISO 14040

Goal and Scope Definition

• Decision(s) to be supported

• Functions of alternatives  functional unit

• Impacts to be considered

• Intended use of the study

• Communication to “Third Parties?”
• Claim of overall preferability?

Life Cycle Inventory Analysis

Life Cycle Inventory Analysis

What is a Unit Process?

• ISO: “The level at which data are gathered”

Life Cycle Impact Assessment

• Origins

• Global warming potentials (GWPs)‏
• Ozone depletion potentials (ODPs)‏
• Origin outside LCA
• Reasonable international acceptance
• Indicators, equivalency measures, not damage calculations
• Permit summation within impact category

The greenhouse mechanism

Climate Change

The Global Burden of Disease

Environmental Risk Factors

A Fuller View of Life Cycles

• Consumption  economic activities 

• Pollution and resource consumption
• Livelihoods, employment, income
• Taxes  public investment

• Changes in livelihoods 

• Health, education, economic participation of families, descendants

• Changes in taxes  Investment in:

• Infrastructure
• Human development
• Technology

Development influences health

• Long-term effect, observed in cross sectional and time series, within and between countries

• Effect confirmed controlling for influence of health on employability

GDP per capita  Life Expectancy

Step 1: Life expectancy = f($GDPPC)‏

• Data: World Bank 2002: 126 countries

• Model form:

• LE = life expectancy, in years
• GDPPC = GDP per capita, 1999 $, adjusted for purchasing power parity

Step 2: Life years saved = f($ GDP)‏

Characterization Factors

Practical Example: 1$M Electricity in Netherlands

Global distribution of stimulated economic activity

Global distribution of health impacts of life cycle pollution

Global distribution of health impacts of development

“Averages” from Macro-Modeling

“Averages” from Macro-Modeling

Task Force Integration of social aspects into LCA

Outline

• Framing Sustainable Development

• Brundland definition
• Consumption, Needs, Well-being
• Suggested alternative that people and organizations can start to apply now

• How Life Cycle Methods can contribute

• The essence of Life Cycle Assessment
• Impacts of development in supply chains
• Beneficience – being sustainable now

An Open Source, Publishing and Analysis Platform For Life Cycle Information about Products

• An Open Source, Publishing and Analysis Platform For Life Cycle Information about Products

• Producers: Tell your story, with data

• Improve your products, with supplier selection

• Buyers: Access green markets

• Drive transformation

Earthster Design Principles

• No cost

• Voluntary

• Open Source

• Use existing standards, work with existing systems

• Report once to serve many audiences

• Makes business sense for user

Free LCA, Confidential, w/ Benchmark

• Click to download a FREE LCA Calculator.

• Runs on your computer.
• Input last year’s data:
• Amounts purchased
• Amount released
• Amount sold

• Click for a table of supply chain pollution

• Click to compare your product vs. sector average

Link to Supplier Data.

• Click to find out if some of your suppliers have published better-than-average LCIs, or made major gains (reductions in emissions / impact).

• Click to take credit – use their LCI data in place of generic, and recalculate your LCI.

• Call other suppliers.

• Call your customers.

The Earthster Consortium

• Opportunity to influence the technical and market development of the Earthster system
• Credit and publicity for being a funder and member of the consortium, including display of your organization's logo in the Earthster website
• Opportunity to help shape the governance and systems for validation of data

Making the world better off with us

• Reduce our negative impacts as far as possible

• Increase our positive impacts to be at least greater than our negative impacts

A market for innovation & transformation

• Use systems such as Earthster to

• Quantify last year's footprint, impacts
• Quantify potential benefits of changes

• Use the web to

• Offer the changes for sale

Stimulate Supply & Demand for Innovations

• Use life cycle tools and other methods to

• Quantify last year's footprint, impacts
• Quantify potential benefits of changes

• Use the web to

• Offer the changes for sale

The “MINT” in today's offset context

• Everyone gets into the act

• Households
• Organizations
• All companies

• No exclusion of “non-additional” (cost-effective)‏

• Your supply chain making you greener... benefits you!

• You sell innovative green things? Market them!

• Cap & trade = we only do as good as the cap, and innovation finds the least-cost solution

• Beneficient market for transformation = we go as far as the mutually reinforcing combination of creativity and demand/desire can take us.

Taking the leap

• Saying: We can't do this alone.

• Saying: I don't know how to get there.

• Putting yourself at the mercy of humanity's (nature's) creativity

• Getting there. Together.

Thriving in ways that promote thriving

• Study, reduce the negative impacts of our consumption and actions

• Create enough positive benefits elsewhere in the world to more than off-set the negative impacts

• Enable innovations that reduce negative impacts

• Take actions, intrinsically valuable, which also generate benefits for others, including those which build/promote:

• Quality of relationships
• Time and attention
• Abilities