Despite the unusual year 2020 turned out to be, there have still been plenty of interesting developments in impact assessment methodologies: on toxicity impacts, particulate matter health impacts, water use impacts, marine impacts, elemental resource scarcity, compaction and water erosion impacts on agricultural soils, and planetary and regional boundaries. This article was written by Laura Golsteijn with contributions from Peter Fantke, Christopher Oberschelp, Anne-Marie Boulay, Rickard Arvidsson, Thomas Sonderegger, and Anders Bjørn.

The Social Hotspots Database system license is now available in the SimaPro LCA software. This database is the first comprehensive database for performing Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA).

Scientific insight is continuously improving, providing us with information that helps our impact assessment calculations be more accurate and better able to predict environmental impacts and how much our products contribute to climate change.

The LCA community proudly strives to cover everything in their assessments: wide system boundaries, the whole lifecycle of a product and many different environmental impact categories. That means that sustainability practitioners have to be able to talk about concepts like eutrophication, photochemical ozone formation, acidification and ecotoxicity. You probably know the meaning of the words, but do you know what it means for the planet? Why is it bad? What causes it? Should we be worried? This series will give you the information you need to work with these concepts in your sustainability efforts. Today’s topic: eutrophication.

Climate change is considered the number one threat for the future of our planet. To take concrete steps in the direction of mitigating climate change, we need sound standards and methodologies to quantify the impacts of our actions. There are a number of different standards to quantify the carbon footprint of products, each best suited for specific applications and target audiences despite efforts to harmonize them. In this article, we take you through the most important standards and methodologies and give you some step-by-step guidance for choosing the right one for your application.

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.

Now even the Dutch central bank clearly reports* that climate change, water stress, raw material scarcity, biodiversity loss and human rights controversies present risks to the financial sector, institutional investors worldwide are looking for ways to safeguard the value of their investments through sustainability analyses. But how can you do that?