11 SDG pathways ready
August 11, 2020 by Bo Weidema
Just finished the 11th out of the 17 SDG pathways for quantitative SDG impact assessment. They are now ready for inspection in our SDG club and for the business partners of the project ”Linking the UN Sustainable Development Goals to life cycle impact pathway frameworks”. The remaining 6 SDGs will be covered within the next few months. We have focused on describing in detail the business ”pressure” indicators (in LCA speak: Life Cycle Inventory indicators), so that the business partners can start data collection for the foreground processes of their pilot case studies.
Impact pathways for issues related to “Education” (mainly SDG 4). This is one of the 11 impact pathway diagrams that are now ready. See more examples in the public report.
Even if you are not an SDG club member or business partner for this project, you can have a look at the first results from the project, which have just been made public in the report “LCA-based assessment of the Sustainable Development Goals”. The report describes two different applications: A qualitative life cycle SDG screening building on existing LCA results, and a quantitative life cycle SDG assessment (LCSA) that goes beyond existing LCA indicators, quantifying the impact pathways, and making the contributions to the SDGs comparable by tracing all impacts to a single-score: the ultimate endpoint of sustainable wellbeing. This allows organizations to calculate how much their product contributes to each SDG, target, and indicator, as well as to overall sustainable wellbeing.
For me, the next step will be to finalise a rough quantification of all the 17 impact pathways, so that the data collection and the further detailing can focus on the impact pathways that have the largest importance for overall sustainability.
For the business partners, the next step will be the foreground data collection for their case studies, so that we can start testing the screening and LCSA methods in practice. If your organisation wishes to participate in this first testing round, we still have room for more business partners. Contact me at .