IE Day 2024 - Limits to downscaling? The pros and cons of absolute sustainability of prod. and serv.

Full title: Limits to downscaling? The pros and cons of absolute sustainability assessment of products and services
The session was a part of the International Industrial Ecology Day 2024 (November 21) - the 4th IE Day organized by the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE).
𝐒𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐫: Stefan Pauliuk
𝐈𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: University of Freiburg, Germany
𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧/𝐋𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞: Freiburg, Germany (9 - 10am):00-10:00 CET, 7-8 pm AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time), 8-9 UTC
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭:
Iniciar sesión
There is a huge drive to break down global sustainability targets (such as climate goals) and planetary boundaries into small units of decision on production and consumption at the company, city, or household levels. Yet direct links between single actors’ mitigation efforts in the near- to mid-term and global sustainability goals/boundaries in the long-term are neither consistent nor defensible without making important additional assumptions about space, time and equity.
The question for scientists is now to what extent it is possible and defensible to develop approaches that apply planetary boundaries in benchmarking and assessment tools such as LCA, and how to deal with the often implicit ethical judgments about the distribution of mitigation efforts across actors.
In this session, we convene three experts who have addressed downscaling approaches from different angles. After a 12-15 minutes input of each speaker, we open the floor for a discussion on how to move forward (the principles that should apply) with the use of actor and product-level assessment that links global long-term targets to single units of production and consumption.
𝐒𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐬:
Speakers:
Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor for Urban Environment and Human Ecology, Australian National University, Canberra, lead author of Bai et al. (2024): “Translating Earth system boundaries for cities and businesses”, doi.org/10.103...
Franck Lecocq, Director, CIRED (Centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement), co-author of Lecocq and Winkler (2024): “Questionable at best: why links between mitigation by single actors and global temperature goals must be made more robust”,
doi.org/10.108...
Reinout Heijungs, Associate Professor, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, co-author of Guinée et al (2021): “Life cycle assessment-based Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment is also relative”
doi.org/10.111...
Moderator: Stefan Pauliuk, Uni Freiburg, Germany