Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

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Sustainable Development and Society Impacts of Development on Health Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a quantitative and comparative method for supporting the identification of environmentally preferable product choices and design options. At the core of LCA is the concept of the “functional unit”: a quantitative measure of the amount of function delivered by a product system or service. LCA as currently practiced takes the delivery of a specified unit of function as a given, then informs inquiries about the total system-wide environmental consequences of delivering this function via alternative product systems; thereby allowing consumers to select “greener” (that is, less environmentally damaging) products, and producers to manufacture greener products. LCA’s primary advantage lies in its ability to help decision makers avoid “burdenshifting” from one environmental problem to another or from one life cycle stage to another. The current impact scope of LCA is restricted to three “endpoints” of concern: human health, ecosystems, and natural resources, focusing on those human health impacts that arise through environmental pathways from stressors in the product life cycle. In addition to environmental pathways, there are also important socio-economic pathways from product life cycles to human health consequences. The 2002 European Health report underlines the relation between socioeconomic factors and health. Poverty, in particular, is recognized as “the most important single determinant of ill health.” The report notes the influence of gross domestic product (GDP) on health at the national level, and explained: “While GDP [has] a significantly positive correlation with life expectancy, this relationship works mainly through the impact of GDP on (a) the incomes of the poor and (b) public expenditure. . . “[F]aster economic growth with a strong employment component [leads to] the enhanced economic prosperity being used to expand relevant social services such as education, social security and health care... Unemployment as a cause of poverty and ill health is a major issue in all European countries.” 4 The importance of poverty in the global burden of disease is even clearer in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2002 report, that found, “In both Africa and Asia, unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene, iron deficiency, and indoor smoke from solid fuels are among the ten leading risks for disease... As with underweight, these risks continue to be some of the most formidable enemies of health and allies of poverty.” 5 Health and socioeconomic status influence each other in a vicious/virtuous cycle, as increases in health promote economic development over time. Research shows that countries with weakest conditions of health and education find it much more difficult to achieve sustained growth than do those with better conditions of health and education. 6 Extending the definition of LCA will enable it to capture the influence of product life cycles on health through the pathways summarized by the WHO reports mentioned above. When a consumer buys a product; or when a producer manufactures the product, these decisions have consequences throughout whole supply chains and life cycles—impacts that change the levels of activity in processes throughout their supply chains and life cycles. Activity levels are measured in both physical units (e.g., increased production) and economic units (increased sales). 17
Sustainable Development and Society Figure 1: Pathways from product decisions to human health outcomes 18 Pathways from product decisions to human health outcomes are charted in Figure 1. The blue arrows indicate the pathways traditionally modeled in LCA, from process activity levels to human health. These pathways start with increased pollution emissions, leading to changed levels of human exposure to hazardous substances. The final health impacts may be measured strictly in terms of mortality impacts (e.g., life-years lost) or may also include nonlethal impacts on health (impaired functioning, chronic pain, and myriad other morbidities). Green arrows indicate the new pathways, addressed in this paper. It shows how changed levels of economic activity throughout the supply chain lead to the two impacts on socioeconomic pathways to health. For example, increased output will increase employment and/or wages, as well as tax receipts by the government. These in turn will reduce income poverty, and thereby increase individuals’ health status if the wage and employment benefits reach people who are otherwise in poor socioeconomic status. Likewise, increased tax receipts by the government can improve health if the increased receipts cause an increase in health-promoting public investments. Figure 1 also includes a “feedback loop” from health status to levels of economic and productive activity. Impacts of health on economic growth over time are not typically modeled in LCA, and they are ignored in this paper as well. We also ignore the important influence that socioeconomic status has on morbidity, focusing instead on the long-term influence of the green pathways on the well-known relationship between life expectancy and per capita gross national product (GDP). Long-term benefits of an incremental increase in GDP vary significantly by country. In general, in countries below $5,000 per capita GNP, there is a very steep influence of economic growth on life expectancy; while above $5,000 per capita, the influence becomes much slighter. Application Step 1: Including Economic Activity Levels in LCA The first step is to include an accounting of economic activity stimulated in different countries, or sets of countries, grouped by
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Smarter Solutions October 2004 GSA
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