Just when we thought that the global situation was settling after COVID, the world is again shaking. Wars and crises, floods, earthquakes, heat waves and the eight warmest years since registers exist – more than ever, we need experts in life cycle assessment (LCA) to assist the world in the transition to a more sustainable model. Fortunately, this year shows plenty of developments in impact assessment. This paper was written by Alba Roibás Rozas and Laura Golsteijn with contributions from Eleonore Pierrat, Anne-Marie Boulay, Mikołaj Owsianiak, Peter Fantke, Chloe Stanford-Clark, Almudena Hospido, and Montserrat Núñez.

Biodiversity, agriculture and food are very current topics, within the field of sustainability and outside of it. They have a strong effect on GHG emissions, climate change and global warming, which means it is essential for policymakers to give these topics some thought. Unfortunately, these topics require a lot of nuanced thinking. In this series, we address biodiversity impact assessment. Part 1: how do you even define ‘nature’?

Standards are based on a set of metrics that allow comparison across products, organizations, or both. An overview of the latest LCA standards can help organizations to keep abreast of developments in global and regional sustainability reporting, and to understand which standards apply to their sector and how to meet them. That way, they can get the most out of their sustainability investments in a practical and timely way. What follows, then, is an overview of the best-known standards and guidelines for the product level, the organization level, or both, as well as a sneak peek at standards now under development.

A new method is available in the SimaPro 9.0 release: Environmental Prices. This method expresses the external costs of one additional unit of pollution in money and results in midpoint characterisation factors that can be used for single-score exercises in life cycle assessment (LCA). Read on to learn the basics of Environmental Prices, or check out the full Environmental Prices Handbook by CE Delft.

Biodiversity refers to the variety of organisms present in an ecosystem, or the genetic variation within an area. This diversity is necessary for many ecosystems and human systems services, either directly (for example, agricultural activities) or indirectly (for example local temperature regulation or natural filtering and cleaning of water streams). For that reason, we need to make sure we protect our planet’s biodiversity and to do so we need to know the impacts of our actions on it.

In 2013, the European Commission started testing the environmental footprint rules in what is known as the environmental footprint (PEF) pilot phase. However, this pilot phase contains more than just PEF. Although the focus is predominantly on the product level (24 out of 26 pilots), this 3-year initiative also aims to test the development of environmental footprint rules for organizations. In this article, I will briefly describe the organizational environmental footprint (OEF) in the European Commission’s initiative.

There are so many initiatives to measure the natural, social and sustainable capital that you would almost trip over them. At a recent sustainability congress, a researcher stated that they had identified over 60 methods for measuring sustainability. And that’s probably not even all. There seem to be over 130 initiatives worldwide.

Environmental footprint assessment is a highly detailed technical tool for evaluating the environmental performance of products or organizations. This level of technical detail, however, often makes it difficult for sustainability professionals to give decisive answers to decision-makers.