Anders Bjørn

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Geography, Planning and Environment

I denne artikel præsenterer og sammenligner vi de danske drivhusgasudledninger per person over tid som opgjort efter UNFCCC’s territorialprincip og et forbrugsbaseret princip baseret på en input-output database. Sammenligningen viser, at de forbrugsbaserede udledninger er højere og er faldet langsommere end udledningerne baseret på UNFCCC-princippe...

Purpose Market-based GHG accounting allows companies to report their emissions based on the purchase of emission attributes. This practice is widespread for reporting ‘scope 2’ electricity emissions and has recently been proposed for both ‘scope 1’ (direct) and ‘scope 3’ (other value chain) emission sources. However, the market-based method has bee...

This paper contributes to academic and policy debates about climate leadership by illustrating an approach to examining national emission reduction targets focusing on Denmark. Widely recognized as a climate leader, Denmark is cherished for both its historical track record and its current climate targets. With a target of 70% emissions reduction by...

Companies are increasingly setting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets to align with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement. Currently, companies set these science-based targets (SBTs) for aggregate GHGs expressed in CO2-equivalent emissions. This approach does not specify which gases will be reduced and risk misalignment with ambitious mitiga...

Purpose Extensive agriculture activities for crop production have led to increasing environmental impacts that threaten to exceed environmentally safe limits. The purpose of this study is to analyze resource efficiency of the agri-food industry, considering the case of sugarcane production in Pakistan. Methods A holistic approach has been applied...

Purpose Planning a transition towards sustainable carbon neutrality at the organization level raises several accounting challenges. This paper aims to shed light on key challenges, highlight answers from current accounting standards and guidance, point out potential inconsistencies or limits, and outline potential solutions from the industrial ecol...

Our current use of plastics is the epitome of an unsustainable lifestyle with their reliance on fossil resources and their widespread application through single use products that, after use, end up in the natural environment. A study now analyses what it would take for plastics to become a sustainable material.

Cities and companies have great potential to reduce pressures on Earth system boundaries. Science-based target setting has emerged as a powerful vehicle, but its uptake is still limited. Moreover, cities and companies develop their targets separately even though many large cities and companies colocate. Focusing on the top emitting 200 cities and 5...

Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s systems. Researchers must help to define science-based targets for water, nutrients, carbon emissions and more to avoid cascading effects and stave off tipping points in Earth’s sys...

As climate change becomes firmly acknowledged as a financial risk, shareholders must consider corporate GHG performance to inform responsible investment decisions. To mitigate future climate risks, prospective benchmarks based on corporate climate mitigation targets are increasingly demanded by shareholders. However, existing benchmarks often lack...

With increasing pressure for climate action, commitments to setting scientifically supported emissions targets have become more common among firms. The target‐setting methods currently endorsed by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) use emission pathways that are aligned with 1.5°C and well‐below 2°C long‐term temperature goals to inform ne...

The materials used globally in the construction sector are projected to more than double in 2060, causing some to deplete. We argue that access to the services that the resources provide must be protected, thus implying that a carrying capacity (CC) for resource dissipation must be set. Dissipation accrues when the resource becomes inaccessible to...

Many companies purchase renewable energy certificates to report reduced emissions, but this may not lead to actual emission reductions. We need emission accounting that is both accurate and that incentivizes companies to make impactful contributions to decarbonizing electricity grids. Renewable energy certificates allow companies to report emission...

Purpose of Review Companies increasingly set science-based targets (SBTs) for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We review literature on SBTs to understand their potential for aligning corporate emissions with the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. Recent Findings SBT adoption by larger, more visible companies in high-income countries has ac...

Current greenhouse gas accounting standards allow companies to use renewable energy certificates (RECs) to report reductions in emissions from purchased electricity (scope 2) as progress towards meeting their science-based targets. However, previous analyses suggest that corporate REC purchases are unlikely to lead to additional renewable energy pr...

The Science Based Targets initiative has published a Comment to our study (Bjørn et al 2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 054019). We see the Comment as an important step towards addressing our study’s call for more systematic presentation of methods for setting science-based targets and increased transparency behind the initiative’s method recommendation...

Ecological modernisation in the form of support to the notion of green growth remains the dominant discourse in environmental policy globally. Still, questions of limits to economic expansion and growth on a planet with finite natural resources have been at the core of environmental discourses at least since the 1970's. A recent effort by Stoknes a...

While large companies routinely announce greenhouse gas emissions targets, few have derived targets based on global climate goals. This changed in 2015 with the creation of the science based targets (SBTs) initiative, which provides guidelines for setting emission targets in line with the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. SBTs have now been...

Purpose The planetary boundaries framework contains regional boundaries in addition to global boundaries. Geographically resolved methods to assess regional environmental impacts are therefore needed. Existing planetary boundaries-based life cycle assessment (PB-LCA) methods have limited geographical resolution or are not applicable to full product...

In many regions and at the planetary scale, human pressures and resulting impacts on the environment exceed levels that natural systems can sustain. These pressures are caused by networks of human activities, which often extend across countries and continents due to global trade. This has led to an increasing requirement for methods that enable abs...

Existing methods for applying the planetary boundary concept in life cycle assessment are not sufficiently spatially and temporally resolved. Here, we develop a new method for freshwater use based on the safe operating space (SOS) at watershed-level. The SOS is based on the concept of environmental flow requirements, which is the share of mean mont...

Existing methods that apply the planetary boundary for the nitrogen cycle in life cycle assessment are spatially generic and use an indicator with limited environmental relevance. Here, we develop a spatially resolved method that can quantify the impact of nitrogen emissions to air, soil, freshwater or coastal water on "safe operating space" (SOS)...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) can be used to translate the planetary boundaries (PBs) concept to the scale of decisions related to products. Existing PB-LCA methods convert quantified resource use and emissions to changes in the values of PB control variables. However, the control variable for the Land-system change PB, “area of forested land remaini...

Large companies now commonly release corporate sustainability (CS) reports in which they describe their approach to handle sustainability challenges. To guide environmental sustainability efforts in the industry, the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology has been recognized as an important tool by researchers and policy makers. But to what extent...

An absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) addresses whether a production or consumption activity can be considered environmentally sustainable in an absolute sense. This involves a comparison of its environmental pressure to its allocated environmental carrying capacity. AESA methods have been developed in multiple academic fields,...

The COP21 summit in Paris led to a policy commitment of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5–2.0 °C and this can be translated to a global annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emission budget that is shrinking rapidly throughout the 21st century. Here, we estimate the reductions in GHG emission intensities of technologies that will be required fo...

In a recent issue of this journal Nikolaou and Tsalis (2018) published a paper titled “A framework to evaluate eco- and social-labels for designing a sustainability consumption label to measure strong sustainability impact of firms/products”. In their paper, the authors (N&T) develop a method for identifying strongly sustainable companies as a basi...

The inventory analysis is the third and often most time-consuming part of an LCA. The analysis is guided by the goal and scope definition, and its core activity is the collection and compilation of data on elementary flows from all processes in the studied product system(s) drawing on a combination of different sources. The output is a compiled inv...

To ensure consistent reporting of life cycle assessment (LCA), we provide a report template. The report includes elements of an LCA study as recommended but the ILCD Handbook. Illustrative case study reported according to this template is presented in Chap. 39.

LCA is often presented as a sustainability assessment tool. This chapter analyses the relationship between LCA and sustainability. This is done by first outlining the history of the sustainability concept, which gained momentum with the Brundtland Commission’s report ‘Our Common Futurereport’ in 1987, and presenting the most common interpretations...

The goal definitionis the first phase of an LCA and determines the purpose of a study in detail. This chapter teaches how to perform the six aspects of a goal definition: (1) Intended applications of the results, (2) Limitations due to methodological choices, (3) Decision context and reasons for carrying out the study, (4) Target audience, (5) Comp...

Cradle to Cradle (C2C) offers a positive vision of a future, where products are radically redesigned to be beneficial to humans and the environment. The idea is not to reduce negative impacts (as in LCA), but to increase positive impacts. This chapter presents the C2C concept and its relationship with the circular economy, the C2C certification and...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has a number of defining characteristics that enables it to address questions that no other assessment tools can address. This chapter begins by demonstrating how the use of LCA in the late 2000s led to a drastic shift in the dominant perception that biofuels were “green”, “sustainable” or “carbon neutral”, which led to...

This report serves as an example report on how to perform an LCA according to the guidance given in Chap. 37 and how to structure the report according to the reporting template in Chap. 38. The goals of the LCA were (i) to perform a benchmarking of a prototype wood/composite (W/C) window made out of glass fibre against three alternative window type...

The scope definition is the second phase of an LCA. It determines what product systems are to be assessed and how this assessment should take place. This chapter teaches how to perform a scope definition. First, important terminology and key concepts of LCA are introduced. Then, the nine items making up a scope definition are elaborately explained:...

The LCA cookbook presents the provisions and actions from the ILCD Handbook that are central in the performance of an LCA. The selection is intended to cover all those activities that an LCA practitioner needs to undertake in a typical process-LCA, and the presentation follows the normal progression of the LCA work according to the ISO framework. F...

The idea of LCA was conceived in the 1960s when environmental degradation and in particular the limited access to resources started becoming a concern. This chapter gives a brief summary of the history of LCA since then with a focus on the fields of methodological development, application, international harmonisation and standardisation, and dissem...

The chapter gives examples of applications of LCA by the central societal actors in government, industry and citizens, and discusses major motivations and challenges for the use of LCA to support science-based decision-making from their respective perspectives. We highlight applications of LCA in policy formulation, implementation and evaluation, p...

Environmental monitoring indicates that progress towards the goal of environmental sustainability in many cases is slow, non-existing or negative. Indicators that use environmental carrying capacity references to evaluate whether anthropogenic systems are, or will potentially be, environmentally sustainable are therefore increasingly important. Suc...

Companies are increasingly encouraged to frame their sustainability activities and communication around ecological limits, as captured by concepts such as planetary boundaries, climate tipping points or local assimilative capacities. Ecological limits may serve as a scientific basis for defining environmentally sustainable companies and, moreover,...

Purpose Consumption of high quantities of pesticides in viticulture emphasizes the importance of including pesticide emissions and impacts hereof in viticulture LCAs. This paper addresses the lack of inventory models and characterization factors suited for the quantification of emissions and ecotoxicological impacts of pesticides applied to viticul...

Purpose There is currently a weak or no link between the indicator scores quantified in life cycle assessment (LCA) and the carrying capacity of the affected ecosystems. Such a link must be established if LCA is to support assessments of environmental sustainability and it may be done by developing carrying capacity-based normalisation references....

Purpose Pesticides are applied to agricultural fields to optimize crop yield and their global use is substantial. Their consideration in life cycle assessment (LCA) is affected by important inconsistencies between the emission inventory and impact assessment phases of LCA. A clear definition of the delineation between the product system model (life...

La performance environnementale couplée à une exigence de qualité des produits est un élément de la compétitivité des exploitations viticoles. Dans le cadre de nos travaux d’évaluation conjointe des performances qualitatives et environnementales des itinéraires techniques viticoles, l’adaptation de la méthode d’évaluation environnementale Analyse d...

The ecological footprint method has been successful in communicating environmental impacts of anthropogenic activities in the context of ecological limits. We introduce a chemical footprint method that expresses ecotoxicity impacts from anthropogenic chemical emissions as the dilution needed to avoid freshwater ecosystem damage. The indicator is ba...

This paper presents a tailored version of PestLCI 2.0, the most advanced life cycle inventory model for quantification of organic pes-ticide emissions from arable land, customized to appropriately account for viticulture specificities affecting pesticides emissions from vineyards. PestLCI 2.0 customization is further supported by the calculation of...

VIEWPOINT Section: Air Pollution and Industrial Hygiene

Purpose. The European Commission has launched a recommended set of characterization models and factors for application in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). However, it is not known how this recommended practice, referred to as the ILCD 2009, performs relative to some of the most frequently used alternative LCIA methodologies. Here, we compare th...

Purpose It has been claimed that in order to assess the sustainability of products, a combination of the results from a life cycle assessment (LCA), social life cycle assessment (SLCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) is needed. Despite the frequent reference to this claim in the literature, very little explicit analysis of the claim has been made. The...

Purpose The aims of this study were to provide an up-to-date overview of global, regional and local networks supporting life cycle thinking and to characterize them according to their structure and activities. Methods Following a tentative life cycle assessment (LCA) network definition, a mapping was performed based on (1) a literature search, (2)...

The cradle‐to‐cradle (C2C) concept has emerged as an alternative to the more established eco‐efficiency concept based on life cycle assessment (LCA). The two concepts differ fundamentally in that eco‐efficiency aims to reduce the negative environmental footprint of human activities while C2C attempts to increase the positive footprint. This article...

The exchange of experience between actors in the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is instrumental for disseminating competences in environmental assessment of products and systems in support of sustainable production and consumption. LCA networks have a potentially strong role in promoting the use of LCA and life cycle thinking, but the numbers...

The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) approach to ecodesign has been gaining increasing interest among industries, authorities and consumers over the last years. With its focus on resource conservation through closing loops, use of solar-based energy sources, avoidance of certain chemicals and the stated aim to create good rather than just avoid doing too muc...