Limitations of Carbon Footprint as Indicator of Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

Greenhouse gas accountings, commonly referred to with the popular term carbon footprints (CFP), are a widely used metric of climate change impacts and the main focus of many sustainability policies among companies and authorities. However, environmental sustainability concerns not just climate change but also other environmental problems, like chemical pollution or depletion of natural resources, and the focus on CFP brings the risk of problem shifting when reductions in CFP are obtained at the expense of increase in other environmental impacts. But how real is this risk? Here, we model and analyze the life cycle impacts from about 4000 different products, technologies, and services taken from several sectors, including energy generation, transportation, material production, infrastructure, and waste management. By investigating the correlations between the CFP and 13 other impact scores, we show that some environmental impacts, notably those related to emissions of toxic substances, often do not covary with climate change impacts. In such situations, carbon footprint is a poor representative of the environmental burden of products, and environmental management focused exclusively on CFP runs the risk of inadvertently shifting the problem to other environmental impacts when products are optimized to become more "green". These findings call for the use of more broadly encompassing tools to assess and manage environmental sustainability.

Benchmarking the environmental performance of dairy farming systems

“…meat, industrial materials). So far, no study examined correlations between environmental indicators from different environmental impact assessment methods within dairy production (Berger and Finkbeiner, 2011;Laurent et al, 2012;Röös et al, 2013). Therefore, studies on exploring correlations between NB and LCA indicators are needed, in order to identify an effective set of indicators that can be used as a proxy for the environmental performance of dairy farming systems.…”

“…One the one hand, climate change is considered to be a very important environmental challenge to the planet (Steffen et al, 2015). On the other hand, policy-makers and industries relying on the carbon footprint as the sole environmental indicator run a risk of overlooking other environmental issues, such as human and eco-toxicity, acidification, and water deprivation (Laurent et al, 2012).…”

“…Exploring correlations between various indicators from different assessment methods can help to reduce unnecessary indicators, and to identify this set of indicators (Lebacq et al, 2013). Previous studies have mainly focused on correlations between LCA indicators (Berger and Finkbeiner, 2011;Laurent et al, 2012;Röös et al, 2013) Although Tier 3 methods are most accurate, they generally require extensive farm specific information. Tier 2 methods are less accurate, but they are most commonly adopted when comparing results across regions and farming systems, because of their relatively lower data requirement.…”

“…Exploring correlations between various indicators can help to identify such a set of indicators (Lebacq et al , 2013). Previous studies have mainly focused on correlations between indicators within LCA (Berger and Finkbeiner, 2011;Laurent et al, 2012;Röös et al, 2013). Berger and Finkbeiner (2011), for example, analysed correlation between several environmental indicators derived from an LCA on a hundred different materials (i.e.…”

“…They concluded that to compare the environmental performance of these materials, the number of indicators can be reduced because of strong correlations between several of the resource-oriented indicators. Laurent et al (2012) analysed correlations between the carbon footprint and thirteen other LCA impact categories of about 4000 different products and concluded that solely relying on the carbon footprint as environmental indicator could result in overlooking other important environmental impacts. Röös et al (2013), however demonstrated that the carbon footprint generally can act as an indicator for acidification and eutrophication potential of different types of meat (i.e., pork, chicken and beef).…”