Assessing Social Impacts: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

<p>The UNEP /SETAC Life Cycle Initiative has put together an extensive list of social impacts that can be used within a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework (Benoit and Mazjin 2009). The goal of this project is to enable assessment of a supply chain’s social impacts in a Social LCA, much the same way as environmental LCA assesses environmental impacts. Two examples of these social impacts are Child Labor and Freedom of Association/Collective Bargaining. A closer look at how assessment of these two impacts might be used reveals some disturbing potential outcomes that may be indicative of flaws in the concept of using LCA to assess social impacts. There are, however, limited applications of Social LCA that seem to offer value. Consideration of worker illness and injury, for example, appears to result in metrics that can be used to identify hot spots, much in the way that a life cycle measurement of respiratory inorganics (particulates) can. EarthShift has been working with an alternative method to assess social impacts called Sustainability Return on Investment. This methodology uses environmental LCA results, environmental and social risk assessment and traditional cost accounting to achieve a coherent triple bottom line assessment. After using this methodology for more than 10 years, we have found it addresses many of the weaknesses of Social LCA, while bringing in the benefits of multicriteria decision analysis and transdisciplinarity. Extensive use of uncertainty and stakeholder perspective make this a robust methodology.