Discussion paper on the assessment of positive impacts and a proposal for criteria for their inclusion in Life Cycle Assessment in general and Social Life Cycle Assessment in particular

The UNEP Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment (Benoît et al. 2009.p.100), define Social Life Cycle Assessment as: “a social impact assessment technique that aims to assess the social and socio-economic aspects of... [ view full abstract ]

The UNEP Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment (Benoît et al. 2009.p.100), define Social Life Cycle Assessment as: “a social impact assessment technique that aims to assess the social and socio-economic aspects of products and their positive and negative impacts along their life cycle”. Di Cesare et al. (2016) and Petti et al. (2014) provide reviews of publications including positive impacts, all of which are very recent, and Ekener-Petersen et al. (2016) provide an extensive discussion on the implications. The UNEP guidelines also state: “An externality occurs when a decision within the value chain imposes costs or benefits on others which are not reflected in the prices charged for the goods and services being provided by the value chain”, and: “Until now, no commonly accepted methodology for assessing internalities and externalities of the production of goods and services for “people” and “profit/prosperity” was available. That is precisely what the tool presented in these Guidelines wants to deliver”. Although some authors state that only those positive impacts may be included above compliance to legal or other standards, a limitation to externalities does not seem to be a systematic criterion for inclusion of a positive impact. Actually, there seem to be few systematic criteria for what to include and what not. Also Ekener-Petersen et al. (2016), the only available discussion of the implications of assessing positive impacts in Life Cycle Assessment, do not systematically discuss the ethics and consequences of inclusion of positive impacts, assess these against the onderlying objectives of Life Cycle Assessment or propose criteria for inclusion of positives. The objective of this paper is to propose a set of criteria for inclusion of positive impacts in Life Cycle Assessment and Social Life Cycle Assessment. Using the existing literature, guided by the reviews by (Di Cesare et al. 2016; Petti et al. 2014; Ekener-Petersen et al. 2016), we evaluated and listed shortcomings, inconsistances and potential problems of inclusion positive impacts for the various mentioned categories and subcategories of aspects. Based on this assessment, we propose a set of criteria for the assessment of positive impacts in Life Cycle Assessment. The ethical and practical issues, potential consequences and challenges involved in including positives in Life Cycle Assessment and especially Social Life Cycle Assessment, are systematically discussed. Based on these issues and challenges a set of core-criteria for inclusion of positives were proposed. The implications of using these criteria are discussed and examples given of concrete positive aspects and activities, complying to these criteria.