Authors
Tellnes, Lars G. F.; Friedrich, Mathilde Fogh; Kjøniksen, Anna-Lena; Koch, Christian
Abstract
The next decade is facing not only a hopeful recovery of the pandemic, but also climate change mitigation targets that will change business practice. Many companies, especially in the construction sector, have performed life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental product declarations (EPD) for their products as a response to customer requirements in the last ten years. However, the current trend is moving to sustainability assessment as an investor requirement and decision support. The aim of the presentation is to provide some important lessons and pitfalls to avoid in such assessments. Investments in new business operations usually have a time horizon of 20 years or more, and drastic changes in technology is need to meet climate change mitigation. There are several metrics available to measure sustainability performance and information about competitor’s performance are available for benchmarking. However, both the metrics and the benchmarking will change. The current trend in making data and sustainable performance tools available will make decision support easier for companies, but the results of such tools have a great risk in decision support if taken for granted that they will not change. In order to mitigate the risks in sustainability assessments for investor decision support, the use of technical specifications behind sustainability metrics are not enough. The information needed for mapping the possible changes in metrices are more available in the stakeholder networks surrounding such metrics. For assessing technology change, both policy and research are important sources of information. Hence, LCA-tools and numbers are not enough and decision support for industry needs to be supplemented with expert judgments on the shape of the change. The presentation will present some examples from practical cases.