Page 62 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

56 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Another recent review by McCollum et al. (2018), unveiled that there
are knowledge gaps regarding the interactions between the energy SDG tar-
gets and those of the non energy-focused SDGs, including their context
dependencies (relating to time, geography, governance, technology, and
directionality). This requires further efforts to promote policy coherence
and integrated assessments to assess potential policy spillovers across sectors,
different sustainability domains, and issues associated to geographic and tem-
poral boundaries. Indeed, the debate on the importance of interlinkages
between SDGs and the interactions due to geographical context, resource
endowments, time horizon, and governance is open (Nilsson et al., 2018).

4 Environmental sustainability
The economic, social, and economic pillars of the sustainability should be
assessed in a quantitative or semiquantitative manner. This requires the
use of specific methods and models to allow the comparison of alternative
solutions and the appraisal of the absolute impacts and performance associ-
ated to a studied system.
Sala et al. (2015a) compared several approaches in order to highlight
those that may be considered more suitable for conducting sustainability
assessment. From this assessment, it emerged that life cycle thinking and life
cycle assessment (LCA) are vital elements of sustainability assessment and
increasingly mentioned as being essential for informing decisions in a com-
prehensive and holistic manner, in both business and policy contexts (Sala
et al., 2013a,b).
While LCA focuses primarily onburdens linked to emissions into the envi-
ronment and resources, life cycle costing (LCC) aims at assessing cost along the
supplychainandtheemergingsociallifecycleassessment(SLCA)complements
thisinrelationtoworkinghours/conditionsandsocialdomainstocompletethe
environment and socioeconomic analysis. Aiming to cover the different pillars
of sustainability, life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) methodologies and
applications are under development aiming at integrating better the sustain-
abilitypillars,whileassessingthemutualinteractionamongthem.Fromthelite-
rature and the LCA practice, it is clear that LCA is a methodology, which may
complement other methodologies and insights, for assessing the performance
of goods/ services/ systems/ technologies/ innovations/ infrastructures/ waste
management options/ regions. While the application of LCA in the context of
business has a longer tradition (starting in the 1970s), the array of options for