Eco-efficiency: From Focused Technical Tools To Reflective Sustainability Analysis

摘要

Major questions as to the sustainability of technologies cannot adequately be answered in integrated quantified models, reckoning with all relevant dynamic mechanisms. LCA-type analysis can convey a picture on the potential environmental impacts of a technology system. This picture has the nature of a scenario, in which decisions of relevant actors as well as circumstances are stated as a potential reality, disregarding intrinsic uncertainties and disregarding bottlenecks for arriving at this stage. Economic data can be linked to these activities, as well, as market prices or value added. Using the technology data for specifying environmental impacts combined with economic data on value creation, an eco-efficiency score can be constructed, in this scenario fashion. Such scenarios give insight in a number of mainly static technology relations, and can be used to compare the sustainability of technology options. If based on stakeholder dialogues, their acceptability may be high. However, if we take the results of the analysis as an objective prediction/forecast, forgetting the decision and context dependency, they may easily lead us astray. It is not fixed technology relations, but dynamic socio-economic, cultural and even physical dynamics which determine the outcomes, both in terms of technologies and volumes involved.