Environmental Footprint Lab

We aim to quantify environmental impacts from a consumer responsibility perspective covering the entire life cycle of the consumed products. We focus on the environmental footprints of international trade, individual products, households, cities, countries and broader regions. We utilize existing environmental footprints, such as the carbon, ecological, water, material and land footprints and we continue to develop novel approaches in development of environmental footprints to reflect human impacts on ecosystems and their services. We apply process life cycle assessment (LCA) and multi-regional input-output analysis (MRIO) in which we focus mainly, but not exclusively, on the quantification of the site-specific environmental impacts of agriculture.

The motivation for our research is the fact that human alteration of Earth systems transgresses the capacity of our planet required to maintain the current conditions in which human society can flourish, while current research suggests that long-term transgression of planetary boundaries will result in unfavorable conditions for human society. Environmental impacts resulting from the life cycle of consumed products, including global supply chains, are driven by the final consumption of products. Despite this, life cycle environmental impacts are often hidden or not considered by decision makers which leads to ineffectiveness and suboptimal decisions. It is important to highlight that planet Earth is still the only one that we are able to inhabit and that its environment is global. Changes made at national or regional level that shift environmental problems to other regions or nations are not solutions or improvements. The methods we use and further develop aim to avoid this through the coverage of the complete global supply chain of the consumed products.

We co-operate with researchers and scientists from our center and world renowned universities and institutions.

We are open to co-operation which:

• Aims at influential scientific results
• Leads to higher publicity and visibility of our topics

 

Key words: biodiversity, ecosystem services, food, agriculture, climate change, pollution, land use, emissions, water, energy, LCA, IOA, international trade, household consumption, EPD, environmental product declaration, life cycle assessment