Indicators and tools for assessing sustainability impacts of the forest bioeconomy

Fats and Oils as Renewable Feedstock for the Chemical Industry

Venture capital firms (VCs) play a unique role in fostering the transition to a sustainable society by financing and supporting technology ventures that contribute to long-term societal and environmental goals. However, the sustainability promise of technology ventures is typically not clear at the early stages of development, requiring critical evaluation and continuous monitoring. VCs thus require an approach for sustainability impact assessment to assess and monitor the sustainability impact of technology ventures and guide sustainable investment decisions – even more so in light of emerging regulatory requirements, such as the European Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. Despite this need, limited research exists on sustainability impact assessment in the venture capital context. This study addresses this gap by investigating how VCs can assess the sustainability impact of technology ventures. Employing a design science research approach, we develop and evaluate a novel sustainability impact assessment framework tailored to the unique characteristics of VC investment. The framework adopts a Design Science (DS) approach, combining insights from a systematic literature review with findings from an in-depth qualitative study with VCs. Our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a set of design principles that enable VCs to conceptualize, assess, and monitor the sustainability impact and risks of their portfolio ventures. Second, we develop a framework for developing and validating design principles in highly contextual and emergent domains such as sustainable venture capital. The resulting design principles and framework integrate perspectives from entrepreneurial finance and technology entrepreneurship, aiming to inform both academic discourse and venture capital practice by positioning sustainability impact assessment as a central criterion in investment decision-making and venture support. • Develops and evaluates a novel sustainability impact assessment framework for venture capital firms. • Integrates theoretical insights and empirical evidence through a systematic design science approach. • Provides eight design principles to guide sustainability impact and risk assessment of early-stage technology ventures. • Demonstrates practical applicability through implementation and evaluation in a European VC fund and thereby addresses the growing need for sustainability impact assessment in venture capital under EU SFDR regulations. • Offers actionable guidelines for integrating sustainability into VC investment decision-making and monitoring processes.

List of Authors.- List of Authors.- Sustainability Impact Assessment: concepts and approaches.- Ex-ante Impact Assessments (IA) in the European Commission - an overview.- Impact Assessment in the European Commission in relation to Multifunctional Land Use.- An institutional analysis of land use modelling in the European Commission.- Ex ante impact assessment of land use changes in European regions - the SENSOR approach.- Transfer into decision support: The Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT).- Scenario modelling of land use changes.- Scenarios: Driving forces and policies.- Cross sector land use modelling framework.- Tourism geography in Europe.- Landscape level simulation of land use change.- Spatial representation and data issues for European regions.- Regional socio-economic profiles for assessment of European land use related policies: the SENSOR experience.- A Spatial Regional Reference Framework for Sustainability Assessment in Europe.- Requirements for data management and maintenance to support regional land use research.- European level indicator framework.- An indicator framework for analysing sustainability impacts of land use change.- Indicators for assessing the environmental impacts of land use change across Europe.- Reflections on Social and Economic Indicators for Land Use Change.- Weighting and aggregation of indicators for sustainability impact assessment in the SENSOR context.- Regional and local evaluation.- Land use functions - a multifunctionality approach to assess the impact of land use changes on land use sustainability.- Limits and targets for a regional sustainability assessment: an interdisciplinary exploration of the threshold concept.- Sustainability Impact Assessments: limits, thresholds and the Sustainability Choice Space.- Key sustainability issues in European sensitive areas - a participatory approach.- Key sustainability issues and the spatial classification of sensitive regions in Europe.

Trade liberalization, as promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO), has become one of the dominant drivers and most controversial aspects of globalization. Trade sustainability impact assessments (SIAs) were introduced as a means of generating better understanding, especially of the social and environmental impacts of trade liberalization, and of making those impacts more consistent with sustainable development. This book takes a hard look at the experience of Trade SIAs to date, and the extent to which they have achieved their objectives and improved the outcomes of trade negotiations. It proposes several ways in which Trade SlAs could be made more effective, and illustrates these in respect of controversial sectors in which trade liberalization has been implemented or proposed, including commodities, services and investment. Finally the book makes proposals beyond SIA through which some of the conflicts between trade liberalization and sustainable development could be more effectively addressed. Written by top researchers and experts on trade SIAs, this book is vital for researchers, academics, postgraduate students and policy makers working on any aspect of impact assessment, international trade or globalization more generally. In addition, the book will provide a particularly useful background for those considering how the environment and trade interrelate at both global and regional levels, with some particular insights on climate change and trade policies. Contents: Overview and general introduction. Part I - The context: trade, SIAs and development: 1: Trade-induced changes in economic inequality : assessment issues and policy implications for developing countries. 2: Why did 'development' entrap the Doha round? 3: Have sustainability impact assessment of trade agreements delivered on 'development' issues: a reflexive analysis of the emergence and main contributions of trade SIAs. Part II - The new challenges of trade liberalisation: beyond SIA: 4: Trade SIAs and the new challenges of trade liberalisation. 5: Investment: the context matters. 6: Sustainability impacts of liberalising trade in services: assessment methodologies and policy responses. 7: The impacts of liberalising trade in commodities. 8: The potential role for collective preferences in determining the rules of the international trading system. Part III - Breaking the impasse: the national policy framework: 9: Improving public participation in sustainability impact assessments of trade agreements. 10: Identifying trade victims. 11: Trade-induced changes in labour market inequalities: current findings and policy implications. 12: The value of value chains: spreading the gains from liberalization. Part IV - International cooperation: 13: Collective preferences and international compensation. 14: Reducing the impacts of the production and trade in commodities. 15: The trade and environment relationships reconsidered: the case of regional trade and climate change. Conclusion

Sustainable agricultural development is fundamental to food security and poverty alleviation, notably in developing countries. Many development initiatives focus on the enhancement of smallholder production and productivity because the majority of poor people in developing countries live in rural areas where agriculture is the main source of livelihood. The consequences of these development initiatives need to be assessed before implementation to reduce the risk of possible negative impacts. This can be done by applying ex ante sustainability impact assessment. Here, we compare methods of assessment of sustainability impact for farming interventions. We review methodological approaches and verify whether the requirements of sustainability impact assessment theory are fulfilled. Our major points are the following: (1) main methodological approaches do not fulfill the requirements defined in the theoretical sustainability impact assessment discourse. (2) The active involvement of different stakeholder groups throughout the assessment process and the possibility of learning and exchange are fundamental to sustainability impact assessment. (3) The institutional dimension of sustainability is not yet sufficiently integrated. We therefore suggest institutional criteria and indicators to be also considered in the sustainability impact assessment framework. We argue that sustainability impact assessment, respecting the interactive involvement of all stakeholder groups throughout the whole process, is a compulsory element in project planning for a sustainable agricultural development in developing countries.

This book chapter discusses how unmet needs of an urban population in developing countries can be met without imposing environmental costs on others outside the city or depleting environmental capital. The chapter offers a framework for addressing population environmental and development issues in sustainable ways. Sustainability can include social cultural economic program operations and maintenance and/or community sustainability. Social sustainability may mean social change rather than keeping something going. When defined as social conditions necessary for supporting environmental sustainability important issues about distribution of resources can be addressed for the present and the future. Sustainable can refer to sustaining the global resource base or limiting the disruption to global cycles. This definition ignores the numbers of people living in poverty malnutrition and ill health among those who lack access to land and water for survival. Environments contribute to the premature death of millions of infants and children. It is best that sustainable development include desirable social economic or political goals at the community city regional and national level. The framework proposed in Our Common Future states that actions must meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This implies minimizing use or waste of renewable resources sustainable use of renewable resources and maintenance of wastes within absorptive capacity of local and global sinks. The current scale and scope of environmental problems poses a threat to future generations. Cities are dependent on fresh water food and fuel. Progress has been slow in containing global warming greenhouse gas emissions and poverty or changing the international economic system to permit more economic stability and prosperity among poorer nations.

Adaptive networks are a versatile approach to model phenomena such as contagion and spreading dynamics, critical transitions and structure formation that emerge from the dynamic coevolution of complex network structure and node states. Here, we study critical transitions in contagion dynamics on multilayer adaptive networks with dynamic node states and present an application to the governance of sustainable resource use. We focus on a three layer adaptive network model, where a polycentric governance network interacts with a social network of resource users which in turn interacts with an ecological network of renewable resources. We uncover that sustainability is favored for slow interaction timescales, large homophilic network adaptation rate (as long it is below the fragmentation threshold) and high taxation rates. Interestingly, we also observe a trade-off between an eco-dictatorship (reduced model with a single governance actor that always taxes unsustainable resource use) and the polycentric governance network of multiple actors. In the latter setup, sustainability is enhanced for low but hindered for high tax rates compared to the eco-dictatorship case. These results highlight mechanisms generating emergent critical transitions in contagion dynamics on multilayer adaptive network and show how these can be understood and approximated analytically, relevant for understanding complex adaptive systems from various disciplines ranging from physics and epidemiology to sociology and global sustainability science. The paper also provides insights into potential critical intervention points for policy in the form of taxes in the governance of sustainable renewable resource use that can inform more process-detailed social-ecological modeling.

ABSTRACTThere is a variety of different methods for carrying out sustainability impact assessments of energy value chains. The different methods can use the same, or similarly named, indicators, but the methods make different assumptions about the system boundaries and differ in the purpose of the assessment, and this can lead to confusion when communicating the results of different studies. A method expansion of Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) was developed and tested to allow comparison of environmental indicators of energy use and generation, energy balance and greenhouse gas emission as calculated according to three different methods: (1) direct value chain environmental impacts (referred to as SIA in this paper), (2) direct plus indirect impacts following a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, and (3) a method based on European Sustainability Criteria (ESC) for solid biomass. The Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment (ToSIA 2.0) was used for this method expansion. Indicator values following the three different approaches were calculated for a typical Nordic bioenergy harvesting chain producing forest wood chips. The indicator values for SIA, LCA and ESC are made comparable side by side, and give thus more insight on the difference and purpose of the three different methods when applied to the same harvesting chain.

Chemical Engineering Plant-based production of commodity chemicals faces steep competition from fossil resources, which are often cheaper and easier to partition. Sustainable use of renewable resources requires strategies for converting complex and recalcitrant biomolecules into streams of chemicals with extraordinary efficiency. Liao et al. developed a biorefinery concept in which wood is eventually fully converted into useful chemicals: phenol, propylene, pulp amenable to ethanol production, and phenolic oligomers that can be incorporated into ink production (see the Perspective by Zhang). A life-cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis highlight the efficiency of the process and reveal the potential for such biorefinery strategies to contribute to sustainable chemicals markets. Science , this issue p. [1385][1]; see also p. [1305][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aau1567 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abb1463

For the past decade the EU has been preparing to end its tradition of preferential and partially reciprocal trade with the African-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) countries. With the expiry of trade preferences in 2007 under the Cotonou Agreement, these trade partners have agreed to negotiate Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) and trade on reciprocal terms, in a bid to preserve their special relationship. A Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) was commissioned by the EU to engage stakeholders in discussion about the real and potential challenges of the new trade regime facing ACP countries. This paper examines the participatory process of the EPA negotiations, in particular the Sustainability Impact Assessment, through the lens of country ownership and deliberative democracy. Discussion of the participation process will be twofold: analysing whether the issues raised in the public sphere are reflected in the CARIFORUM-EC EPA, and the extent to which the SIA is legitimised through public participation.

The production of clean electrical energy and the correct use of waste materials are two topics that currently concern humanity. In order to face both problems, extensive work has been done on the electrolytic production of green H2 coupled with the electrooxidative upgrading of biomass platform molecules. 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is obtained from forest waste biomass and can be selectively oxidized to 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA) by electrochemical pathways. FDCA is an attractive precursor to polyethylene furanoate (PEF), with the potential to replace petroleum-based polyethylene terephthalate (PET). An integrated electrochemical system can simultaneously produce H2 and FDCA at a lower energy cost than that required for electrolytic water splitting. Here, the benefits of the electrochemical production of H2 and FDCA over other production methods are presented, as well as the innovative applications of each reaction product and the advantages of carrying out both reactions in a coupled system. The recently reported progress is disclosed, through an exploration of electrocatalyst materials used in simultaneous production, including the use of nickel foams (NF) as modification substrates, noble and non-noble metals, metal non-oxides, metal oxides, spinel oxides and the introduction of oxygen vacancies. Based on the latest trends, the next challenges associated with its large-scale production are proposed for its implementation in the industrial world. This work can offer a guideline for the detailed understanding of the electrooxidation of HMF towards FDCA with the production of H2, as well as the design of advanced electrocatalysts for the sustainable use of renewable resources.

This study assesses business angels’ approaches to sustainability impact assessments through a principal–agent lens. Interviews with 20 angels shed light on different frameworks and tools, as well as the drivers, challenges, and temporal aspects underlying angels’ integration of sustainability impact assessments. While some angels implement systematic sustainability impact assessments throughout the entire investment process, others consciously decide against adopting such approaches and rely on their gut feeling. A third group acknowledges the need for more applicable tools but is hindered by data and resource limitations, as well as a lack of suitable methodologies. Based on extant literature and the empirical findings, a framework for angel sustainability impact assessment is presented. These findings further support the importance of sustainability knowledge for investors. Principal–agent theory is modified to account for context- and time-specificities. Recommendations for future research and practice are made as well as contributions to the green entrepreneurial finance literature.

The food system is unsustainable and requires reconfiguration, however more data is required to assess the impacts of action which might contribute to a more sustainable food future. Responding to this, extensive research with food sharing initiatives—activities which have been flagged for their potential sustainability credentials—led to the co-design of an online sustainability impact assessment (SIA) tool to support food sharing initiatives to asses and evidence their sustainability impacts. This paper reports on the initial user testing of the resulting online tool: The Toolshed which forms the indicator based SIA element of the SHARE IT platform. Feedback gathered from the initiatives testing the tool are analyzed and summaries of their reported impacts detailed. This analysis confirms the need for the tool, the relevance of the indicators included and the value of SIA reports for internal reflection and external communication. Nonetheless, challenges remain in relation to resourcing the practice of SIA reporting. We conclude with a plan for expanding engagement with The Toolshed and the wider SHARE IT platform.

Systemising gender integration with rural stakeholders' sustainability impact assessments: A case study with three low-input upgrading strategies

It is important to insert agricultural research in this paper by considering it as a strategic area for providing knowledge and a technological base for agricultural production, considering that this sector generates outcomes with respective impacts to rural zones, supply-chain, economy, society and environment, representing a key piece for reaching United Nations objectives of sustainable development to each country and to the planet. Aiming to analyze how agricultural research organizations (as for instance: INRA and CIRAD, from France and EMBRAPA, from Brazil) have driving sustainability impact assessment methodologies and their interaction with transdisciplinary and holistic principles, using as a base innovation concepts. This paper will display an overview on concepts and approaches about sustainability impact assessment, but looking from a transversal perspective, passing by an historical description on impact assessment and on concepts related to sustainable development and sustainability. We will search for unedited models of sustainability impact systems by converging holism, transdisciplinarity and sustainability. There are several methodologies but few demonstrate an integrated view with a transversal perspective. It is also imperceptible any concrete governance-managerial system for sustainability impact assessment, considering every stage of the process, from a strategic to an operational level, including, analyzing environment, economy and society dimensions as one unique perspective. Such as a complex and multidimensional sector of economy, agricultural research requires profiled sustainability impact assessment with an innovative and dynamic approach.