Downscaling the planetary boundaries in absolute environmental sustainability assessments – A review

Ryberg, Morten; Andersen, Martin Marchman; Owsianiak, Mikołaj; Hauschild, Michael Zwicky

doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.123287

Cited by 118 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 50 publications

(80 reference statements)

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“…However, quantifying absolute environmental sustainability requires the explicit consideration of the planet's finite resources and carrying capacity. 43,44 The PBs concept defined by Rockström et al 28 (later updated by Steffen et al 29 ) provides absolute planetary limits and background levels for a set of nine critical Earth-system processes that can be used to quantify the absolute sustainability level of technologies. We use this framework together with Ryberg's method 31 to quantify the absolute environmental sustainability level of hydrogen technologies.…”

Section: Methodology Life Cycle Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of hydrogen in heavy transport to operate within planetary boundaries

Valente

Tulus

Galán‐Martín

et al. 2021

Sustainable Energy Fuels

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Section: Methodology Life Cycle Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of hydrogen in heavy transport to operate within planetary boundaries

Valente

Tulus

Galán‐Martín

et al. 2021

Sustainable Energy Fuels

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“…Meanwhile, non‐egalitarian methods recommend an allocation based on current contributions to the total impact among human activities 22 . Here, we apply three principles, namely two egalitarian based on the final consumption expenditure (FCE), which reflects the consumers' preference for the product or activity related to the SC, and a non‐egalitarian one, status quo (SQ), based on current emissions 20,23 . Note that, ideally, an integrated assessment model accounting for all of the sectors of the economy should be developed to find optimal global pathways to operate sustainably within the PBs.…”

Section: Modeling Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing biomass supply chains within planetary boundaries

2021

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The design of sustainable supply chains, which recently emerged as an active area of research in process systems engineering, is vital to ensure sustainable development. Despite past and ongoing efforts, the available methods often overlook impacts beyond climate change or incorporate them via standard life cycle assessment metrics that are hard to interpret from an absolute sustainability viewpoint. We here address the design of biomass supply chains considering critical ecological limits of the Earth—planetary boundaries—which should never be surpassed by anthropogenic activities. Our method relies on a mixed‐integer linear program that incorporates a planetary boundaries‐based damage model to quantify absolute sustainability precisely. We apply this approach to the sugarcane‐to‐ethanol industry in Argentina, identifying the optimal combination of technologies and network layout that minimize the impact on these ecological boundaries. Our framework can find applications in a wide range of supply chain problems related to chemicals and fuels production, energy systems, and agriculture planning.

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“…There is now a modest growth industry in downscaled PBs, DPBs [71][72][73], which have been proposed as ways of distributing responsibility for the planet down to regional and local levels where citizens might more readily become engaged: "Think globally, act locally." As with sustainability indicators, a literature assessing DPBs is emerging [64,74]. The choice of denominator for downscaling provides opportunity to reflect a variety of human valuese.g., egalitarianism, efficiency, or responsibility-in the downscaling process.…”

Section: Management Of Extraordinary Risksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resource Scarcity and Sustainability—The Shapes Have Shifted but the Stakes Keep Rising

Randall

2021

Sustainability

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The objective is to provide an interpretive reading of the literature in resource scarcity and sustainability theory from the nineteenth century to the present time, focusing on shifts that have occurred in problem definition, conceptual framing, research tools applied, findings, and their implications. My reading shows, as one would expect, that the discourse has become more technical and the analysis more sophisticated; special cases have been incorporated into the mainstream of theory; and, where relevant, dynamic formulations have largely supplanted static analysis. However, that is barely scratching the surface. Here, I focus on more fundamental shifts. Exhaustible and renewable resource analyses were incorporated into the mainstream theory of financial and capital markets. Parallels between the resources and environmental spheres were discovered: market failure concepts, fundamental to environmental policy, found applications in the resources sector (e.g., fisheries), and renewable resource management concepts and approaches (e.g., waste assimilation capacity) were adopted in environmental policy. To motivate sustainability theory and assessment, there has been a foundational problem shift from restraining human greed to dealing with risk viewed as chance of harm, and a newfound willingness to look beyond stochastic risk to uncertainty, ambiguity, and gross ignorance. Newtonian dynamics, which seeks a stable equilibrium following a shock, gave way to a new dynamics of complexity that valued resilience in the face of shocks, warned of potential for regime shifts, and focused on the possibility of systemic collapse and recovery, perhaps incomplete. New concepts of sustainability (a safe minimum standard of conservation, the precautionary principle, and planetary boundaries) emerged, along with hybrid approaches such as WS-plus which treats weak sustainability (WS) as the default but may impose strong sustainability restrictions on a few essential but threatened resources. The strong sustainability objective has evolved from maintaining baseline flows of resource services to safety defined as minimizing the chance of irreversible collapse. New tools for management and policy (sustainability indicators and downscaled planetary boundaries) have proliferated, and still struggle to keep up with the emerging understanding of complex systems.

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Downscaling the planetary boundaries in absolute environmental sustainability assessments – A review

Cited by 118 publications

References 50 publications

The role of hydrogen in heavy transport to operate within planetary boundaries

The role of hydrogen in heavy transport to operate within planetary boundaries

Designing biomass supply chains within planetary boundaries

Resource Scarcity and Sustainability—The Shapes Have Shifted but the Stakes Keep Rising

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