DOI
10.1080/23299460.2014.920121
Anticipatory Life Cycle Assessment for Responsible Research and Innovation
摘要
The goal of guiding innovation toward beneficial social and environmental outcomes – referred to in the growing literature as responsible research and innovation (RRI) – is intuitively worthwhile but lacks practicable tools for implementation. One potentially useful tool is life-cycle assessment (LCA), which is a comprehensive framework used to evaluate the environmental impacts of products, processes, and technologies. However, LCA ineffectively promotes RRI for at least two reasons: (1) Codified approaches to LCA are largely retrospective, relying heavily on data collected from mature industries with existing supply chains and (2) LCA underemphasizes the importance of stakeholder engagement to inform critical modeling decisions which diminishes the social credibility and relevance of results. LCA researchers have made piecemeal advances that address these shortcomings, yet there is no consensus regarding how to advance LCA to support RRI of emerging technologies. This paper advocates for development of anticipatory LCA as non-predictive and inclusive of uncertainty, which can be used to explore both reasonable and extreme-case scenarios of future environmental burdens associated with an emerging technology. By identifying the most relevant uncertainties and engaging research and development decision-makers, such anticipatory methods can generate alternative research agenda and provide a practicable tool to promote environmental RRI.
中文摘要
引导创新取得有益的社会和环境成果的目标——在不断增长的文献中被称为负责任的研究和创新（RRI）——在直觉上是有价值的，但缺乏切实可行的实施工具。一个潜在有用的工具是生命周期评估（LCA），这是一个用于评估产品、工艺和技术的环境影响的综合框架。然而，生命周期评价无效地促进了RRI，至少有两个原因：（1）生命周期评价的编码方法在很大程度上是回顾性的，严重依赖于从具有现有供应链的成熟行业收集的数据；（2）生命周期评估低估了利益相关者参与为关键建模决策提供信息的重要性，这降低了结果的社会可信度和相关性。生命周期评价研究人员已经针对这些缺点取得了零星的进展，但对于如何推进生命周期评价以支持新兴技术的RRI，还没有达成共识。本文主张
来源智库
Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (United States)
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