How to bring absolute sustainability into decision-making: An industry case study using a Planetary Boundary-based methodology

Abstract

The Planetary Boundaries concept has emerged as a framework for articulating environmental limits, gaining traction as a basis for considering sustainability in business settings, government policy and international guidelines. There is emerging interest in using the Planetary Boundaries concept as part of life cycle assessment (LCA) for gauging absolute environmental sustainability. We tested the applicability of a novel Planetary Boundaries-based life cycle impact assessment methodology on a hypothetical laundry washing case study at the EU level. We express the impacts corresponding to the control variables of the individual Planetary Boundaries together with a measure of their respective uncertainties. We tested four sharing principles for assigning a share of the safe operating space (SoSOS) to laundry washing and assessed if the impacts were within the assigned SoSOS. The choice of sharing principle had the greatest influence on the outcome. We therefore highlight the need for more research on the development and choice of sharing principles. Although further work is required to operationalize Planetary Boundaries in LCA, this study shows the potential to relate impacts of human activities to environmental boundaries using LCA, offering company and policy decision-makers information needed to promote environmental sustainability.

Absolute Sustainability‐Based Life Cycle Assessment (ASLCA): A Benchmarking Approach to Operate Agri‐food Systems within the 2°C Global Carbon Budget

“…; Ryberg et al. ). This is the same as the approach used in the SDA method to calculate GHG emissions reduction targets on a (global) sector level (Krabbe et al.…”

“…Regarding the ethical dimension, several methods are available in the literature, which guide downscaling the global boundaries in proportion to past environmental impacts, population, mass, economic value, and relative contribution to human well‐being (e.g., Liu and Bakshi ; Ryberg et al. ). A detailed discussion is available in work by Bjørn ().…”

Integrating the Water Planetary Boundary With Water Management From Local to Global Scales

“…The fair shares approach requires allocating the global safe operating space to subglobal scales and entities. For commercial organizations, economic indicators such as a corporation's global market share are typically used (Ryberg et al, ; Sandin et al, ). For political contexts (e.g., nations), allocation is most often implemented using a per capita approach in which the global value of the control variable of the planetary boundary is apportioned based on the number of people living in that nation (Dao et al, ; Hoff et al, ; Nykvist et al, ; O'Neill et al, ).…”

A Framework for Development and Communication of Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment Methods

“…; Haberl et al. ) Methods originating in LCA community, for example, Bjørn and Hauschild (), Doka , and Ryberg and colleagues () Planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. ; Steffen et al.…”

“…Different allocation principles for distributing scarce resources exist (Muñoz and Gladek ; Ryberg et al. ): The contribution to value‐added principle holds that the allocated carrying capacity is proportional to the economic value produced by an activity (Randers ). According to the grandfathering principle , an activity's allocated carrying capacity is “inherited” from its share of total environmental pressure in a past reference year (Knight ).…”