Launch of translated UNEP 2020 Social Life Cycle Alliance Guidelines

Head of UNEP Brussels office, Veronika Hunt Šafránková, spoke at the Implementing the 2020 Social Life Cycle Alliance (LCA) Guidelines event on 7 December. This event was held in Brussels and was organized in collaboration with the Belgian Minister of Climate, Environment, Sustainable Development and Green Deal and the Quebec Government Office in Brussels. The first Social LCA guidelines were published by the Life Cycle Initiative in 2009. Last year, the revised version of the guidelines was published. UNEP presented the results of their road-testing on this occasion. Results from the pilot projects will be summarized into a compendium in 2021. More about the Social LCA guidelines can be read here. Please find below the speech that Veronika Hunt Šafránková gave before the audience.



 

"Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends

First, let me express UNEP’s appreciation to our hosts today: Madame Zakia Khattabi, Belgian Minister of Climate, Environment, Sustainable Development and Green Deal, and Mr. Benoît Charette, Minister of the Environment and the Fight Against Climate Change of Québec.

We are facing three major interconnected environmental crises: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. These crises are directly linked to current unsustainable patterns of consumption and production.

Many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as several resolutions of the UN Environment Assembly, remind us of the need to address the crucial problem of unsustainable consumption and production through an integrated systems approach.

Life Cycle approaches help to identify priorities and opportunities to improve production and consumption systems, while avoiding unintended trade-offs in environmental, social and economic impacts.

Practical tools exist to bring a Life Cycle perspective into the design of better policies, for example the UNEP Sustainable Consumption and Production Hotspots Analysis Tool (SCP-HAT) provides a desk-top analytical tool for countries to determine the resource and pollution intensive hotspots associated with their current production and consumption patterns.

However, social and socio-economic effects are not often considered from a whole life cycle perspective, meaning the full picture is not being considered. To get a more holistic view of the Life Cycle of a product or service, the Social LCA Guidelines have been created.

Social LCA is already a practical tool that allows making the link between social impacts of a product’s consumption and production to the organization’s impacts across the life cycle of a product.

The Guidelines provide a roadmap and a body of knowledge to help stakeholders in the assessment of social and socio-economic impacts of products’ life cycles, their related value chains and organizations.

The first S-LCA guidelines were published by the Life Cycle Initiative in 2009. Last year the revised version of the guidelines was published and today we present the results of the road-testing.

Various pilots were conducted, proving the practicality of Social LCA. Most of the nine pilots were successfully delivered, which, during a global pandemic, is a huge success.

The guidelines have been applied and companies have learned to use Social LCA as a decision-support tool.  For example, the Project for International Copper Association applied S-LCA methodology to identify social risk levels of copper from extraction to refining using the Social Hotspot Database Risk Mapping Tool. The pilot project described the Guidelines as very useful and providing a straightforward path to measure social performance and risks.

Many lessons were learned by pilot partners including the how the application of social hotspots screening at the beginning of the study was useful in pointing at one hotspot that was later confirmed with primary data.

Now it will be important to replicate more and more case studies and support, with a database, the SME’s and companies which do not have the resources to apply the S-LCA.

We can use Social LCA to measure the effects on society as we transition to circularity and sustainable consumption and production.

We know that making our economies circular could unlock USD 4.5 trillion of economic growth (Accenture, 2015) [1] and create millions of new jobs. Social LCA can help us identify the best opportunities to invest in knowledge, skills, and training to ensure workers have access to decent, safe, and attractive job opportunities in circular economy. We must consider that opportunities are likely to concentrate on recycling and offering maintenance services and find ways to support the shift in countries and industries that currently rely heavily on linear models.

The Social LCA framework calls upon a stakeholder approach where the potential impacts on different stakeholder categories are considered. With Social LCA we can measure both the positive and negative impacts on a wide range of stakeholders as we transition to circular economy and sustainable consumption and production.

Finally, I would like to express high appreciation to those who made the translations of the Social Life Cycle Assessment Guidelines into French, Dutch and Italian: the Québec Government Office in Brussels; the Belgian Federal Institute for Sustainable Development; and the Universities of Pescara and Cusano in Italy.

Let me thank the organisations that have road-tested the guidelines and particularly the ones present with us today.

And last but not least, to the Social Life Cycle Alliance and its affiliated members who have worked hard in the past few years to revise the Social LCA Guidelines and apply them in practice, within the framework of the UNEP’s Life Cycle Initiative.

[1] https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/the-circular-economy-could-unlock-4…