The humanitarian sector is increasingly considering the environmental impact of assistance and operations. These efforts include the use of life cycle analyses (LCA), the development of scorecards to assess the overall environmental impacts of assistance and operations and the provision of guidance on how to use LCA and scorecards results as input into decision making about what and how humanitarian assistance is provided. LCA assessment procedures generally focus on calculating the generation of carbon dioxide equivalents. However, it is not enough to simply be able to measure the CO2 eq. emissions, practitioners must then be able to makeinformed decisions about how to mitigate against the various potential environmental impacts, and a balanced scorecard approach can support that.
The scorecard approachbrings together LCA results and other factors which could have environmental or other impacts. A core intent of the Scorecard approach is to avoid making a decision based on one factor only to later find that factors not considered led to significant negative environmental or human harm.
To ensure decisions using LCA or Scorecard results are robust, decision support tools (DST) to incorporate factors such as cost, acceptability and logistics are likely useful in many cases. Work on humanitarian LCAs, Scorecards and DST is expanding in technical scope and in relation to the humanitarian sectors involved.
This session – organized jointly by the Joint Initiative for Sustainable Humanitarian Assistance Packaging Waste Management andthe Global Shelter Cluster – will explore the diversity of efforts and identify potential ways to build on experiences and results. It will attempt to answer the following questions
- What are the different tools and techniques available to humanitarian organizations and what are their pros and cons?
- How can humanitarian actors ensure coordination and harmonization of approaches, therefore avoiding contradictions?
- What is needed to accelerate the use of such tools and techniques?
📅 Tuesday, May 7th
🕧 4PM-5:30PM
🔗 Registration link
