Sept 6, 11:00 – 12:30 | Plenary Session 1

Eric Mieras, Managing Director at PRé, will be one of the keynote speakers of this panel discussion together with other policymakers, experts, advocates and industry executives. During this session, they will share the latest developments in LCA and discuss the next steps in scaling up LCM to support us with our biggest sustainability challenges.

Sept 6, 16:30 – 18:00 | Session “Social Life Cycle Assessment in practice: Implementation and Value Derived”

Through 10 years of learnings from the Social Value Initiative, industry partners have developed experience in various applications including 1) reporting in preparation for mandatory requirements and 2) scaling up assessments to cover product portfolios. In their presentation, Shaniq Pillay and Mark Goedkoop focused on mapping the legislative landscape and sharing learnings and insights about how social impact assessment can be integrated into business practice.

Sept 7, 11:00 – 12:30 | Session “Innovative approach to rethinking Sustainability, the UN SDGs and the Circular Economy”

Shaniq Pillay presented the recently published methodology linking LCA to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The methodology, developed under the Life Cycle Initiative project, acts as an add-on assessment to link life cycle impact information to the SDG targets. The method classifies the links between environmental and social impact categories and SDG targets under each goal.

Sept 7, 11:00 – 12:30 | Session “Setting environmental sustainability targets in LCM”

Society needs to minimise the risk of species extinctions in the long term. International organisations use metrics to monitor the species extinction caused by human activities, such as State Indicators, the Living Planet Index. Companies and investors are using footprint metrics. So far, the Footprint and State Indicator Metrics seem to be unrelated, which complicates international policy development and target setting. This is different form Climate policies where Footprints and the Paris Agreement all use CO2 equivalents. In their paper, Mark Goedkoop and Marina Dumont showed that there are elegant ways to circumvent this, opening up completely new ways to link the impacts from companies to international conventions and (science based) targets.

Sept 7, 16:30 – 18:00 | Session “Developing the future life cycle network”

Mark Goedkoop discussed the consequences of the overwhelming demand of lifecycle-based metrics and data, driven by major legislation and the wide recognition we are in a climate, biodiversity, and inequality crisis. Companies start to look behind their tier 1 supplier, and need to understand their value chain to identify risks and opportunities. This success of our community has its consequences. We believe we need to apply more strategically; move away from assessing individual products, but rather focus on (1) portfolio assessment, (2) help companies to prepare for Due Diligence requirements, which focus on social impacts) (3) inform investors for instance by supporting the Taxonomy legislation. Are we ready for all this?

Sept 8, 09:00 – 10:30

Shaniq Pillay co-chaired a session around innovations in methodologies. It was an interesting session as contributions varied among many different topics: potential advancements regarding environmental, social or economic aspects as well as integrations of LCA, LCC, circular economy and many other topics.

Sept 8, 13:30 – 15:00 | Session “Valorization of LCA results in a LCM perspective (2)”

Marina Dumont showcaseed how LCA-based thinking can be introduced into unusual equations – for example the financial world. The focus of the presentation was to understand LCA as the base engine for calculating the biodiversity impacts of financial products, from which further insights can be generated by integrating various additional perspectives.