The Need for a Preference-Based Multicriteria Prioritization Framework in Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

Abstract

Life cycle thinking is a valuable tool for integrated assessment of the environmental, social, and economic outcomes of human activities. The combination of the three as life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is a powerful decision support tool, but it also presents important design challenges. Among the most important challenges is how to include subjective information necessary for defining the major elements of a decision: prospects to decide among, uncertainty, risk attitudes, and preferences. Previous work on values in life cycle methods has addressed prospects, uncertainty, and risk attitudes. This article builds on that work by arguing that given LCSA's broad scope, explicit and standardized intercategory preferences are especially important for improving its value for decision makers. Practitioners should not be solely responsible for the value judgments necessary to integrate impact categories within and across environmental life cycle assessment (E-LCA), social LCA (S-LCA), and life cycle costing evaluations for LCSA. Neither should this task fall entirely to decision makers, particularly as life cycle–grounded decisions are highly sensitive to value frames. Individuals are unlikely to be able to meaningfully interpret, evaluate, and determine trade-offs without support. This article thus proposes that LCSA leverage its multiple paradigms to rigorously generate explicit, empirically grounded intercategory preference archetypes for use in evaluating decision robustness, much as cultural theory-based archetypes are currently used to test robustness to risk attitudes. Proof-of-concept data from the United States illustrate this approach, named WELFARES.