Page 146 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

132 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

mathematically assess such a goal we would also need to define the param-
eters and thresholds of a “healthy” life and attempt to identify and enumerate
a universally applicable causality of happiness.
Epistemologically, approaches such as LCA and LCC could be described
as positivist in that they seek to identify purely objective knowledge. Con-
versely, many aspects of the social sciences lean toward interpretivism and, as
such, are focused on ideas such as personal experience, perceived knowl-
edge, and social construction: phenomena that are much harder to quantify.
Consequently, much prior work in the social sciences is difficult to incor-
porate into a more numerical LCSA framework (Iofrida et al., 2018).
In addition to this overarching difficulty, the rapidly developing field of
social LCA often lacks data, lacks standardized/accepted indicators (K€uhnen
and Hahn, 2017), and struggles to include “positive” impacts (as opposed to
the traditionally “negative” impacts associated with environmental or eco-
nomic indicators) (Ekener et al., 2018).
There is considerable ongoing research in this area with the aim of inte-
grating social indicators and assessment techniques into LCSA. In general,
there is some agreement that genuine success will require greater engage-
ment with the social sciences and the use of qualitative, interpretivist
approaches. However, as the topic is broad and evolving, interested readers
are directed to dedicated works such as K€uhnen and Hahn (2017) and
Rafiaani et al. (2018).
Despite the challenges and caveats outlined before, it is possible to identify
some commonly used indicators of social sustainability from the existing
applied literature. In the gassector, forinstance, several studies have measured
employment creation, health and safety issues, public perception, and public
nuisance, the latter measured via particular metrics such as noise creation or
traffic levels (Cooper et al., 2018a). Table 5.3 provides a selection of the issues
and indicators that have been used in literature; note that these are illustrative
but by no means exhaustive, and that the specific methodology associated
with each indicator is discussed in length in the cited publications.
Readers may notice that some of the indicators in Table 5.3 are taken
from LCA: human toxicity potential, depletion of abiotic resources (ele-
ments), and depletion of abiotic resources (fossil fuels) are impact categories
from the CML methodology (see Table 5.2). This is because the environ-
mental issues addressed by LCA have direct social consequences, meaning
that some LCA impacts may be better classified as social issues. In fact, all
three pillars of sustainability have strong overlaps meaning that the choice
of classification is somewhat subjective.