Innovation for Sustainable Development as a Topic for Environmental Assessment

摘要

Even though the broader goal of industrial ecology (IE) is to stimulate large-scale system-level changes, current IE tools, such as life cycle assessment (LCA), environmentally extended input- output analysis (EE-IOA), and material flow analysis (MFA), are not very good at coping with the dynamics of such system changes. Although innovation researchers have studied system changes in mobility, energy, and agro-food, the greater sustainability of such systems is too often merely assumed. This essay proposes to combine the different types of research.