SWISSCHAINS – Swiss Sustainable Supply Chain Lab
In the short video here above, PhD student Shuntian Wang gives a brief overview of the project (if the video is not available in your region, please use external pagethis link).
SWISSCHAINS is an interdisciplinary research incubator, bringing expertise in political science, engineering, economics, and geology. The project will provide novel insights into where and how Swiss and European supply chains can be more sustainable. Worldwide, the trade flow of food, minerals, and metals increases rapidly. Due to this high demand, the social and environmental production impacts are noticeably displaced from the primary consumption regions. The research of SWISSCHAINS on this production pattern addresses the management of global supply chains. While awareness of the nexus rises, solutions to their disproportionate negative externalities only emerge. A substantial challenge to achieving environmentally and socially sustainable production is that supply chain interventions must overcome interacting and self-enforcing impacts.
ESD will conduct Work Package 1 of this project, whose aim is to link Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) with ecosystem services (ES) assessment. The goal is to understand the impact of the case study products (chocolate/cocoa, jewellery/gold, and batteries/cobalt, lithium and other minerals) on land uses, biodiversity, and bundles of ecosystem services over time in a spatially explicit manner at the global and regional scale.
In the short video here below, PhD student Shuntian Wang gives a brief overview of the project:
If the video is not available in your region, please use external pagethis link.
Collaboration
This research is conducted as a collaborative project between the chair of Ecological Systems Design and the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy.