Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Circularity

The triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution stems from our current unsustainable production-consumption systems that prioritize economic growth over ecological health and genuine human wellbeing. Addressing these interconnected challenges requires deliberating the design and assessment of transition pathways that move us from our present state to systems that promote wellbeing while respecting planetary boundaries. 

These transition pathways represent strategic roadmaps that must be systemic, just, adaptive, evidence-based and truly transformative in order to alter the fundamental relationships between human activities and natural systems.

The current economic paradigm has encouraged resource-intensive production systems that externalize environmental and social costs, making it essential to redefine prosperity beyond material consumption, decouple wellbeing from resource throughput, properly value ecosystem services in decision-making, and prioritize sufficiency over mere efficiency in resource use.

Key transformation needs include:

Designing regenerative systems

Technology development, the built environment and product design must support sustainability transitions by embracing regenerative design principles that restore rather than deplete natural resources, establishing circular material flows that eliminate waste and prioritizing durability, repairability and recyclability.

Developing robust assessment frameworks

To evaluate systemic impacts and long-term performance, transition pathways require tools that evaluate production and consumption systems against planetary boundaries, measure impacts across full life cycles and value chains, assess social and ecological returns alongside financial ones and consider long-term implications across generations.

Advancing sustainable innovation & resource use

Innovation priorities should focus on developing technologies that actively regenerate damaged ecosystems, creating materials that are safe for humans and the environment and remain within technical cycles for as long as possible, building systems that operate using renewable energy with minimal resource input, and designing digital tools that optimize resource use and enable sharing economies.

Fostering multi-scale coordination

Effective transition pathways require coordination across local initiatives, national policies, global cooperation and business transformation, demanding significant collaboration across sectors, disciplines and worldviews.

The mission of the Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Circularity unit is to address these challenges by developing solutions that combine technological innovations and built environment modelling with assessments of socio-economic, safety and environmental impacts. 

By advancing scientific methods, demonstrating solutions in collaborative research and policy support, and transferring technologies to stakeholders, the unit assists industry and policymakers in designing and implementing societal-level transition strategies. By centring wellbeing within planetary boundaries, the unit supports the development of technologies and systems that aim to serve humanity's genuine needs rather than perpetuating unsustainable growth paradigms.

Advancement of scientific methods

The unit advances scientific methods and technologies that address the challenges of the triple planetary crisis across LIST’s priority areas. 

While successfully spinning off a unique in-vitro technology that mimics lung function for an accurate, animal-free toxicity assessment (InVitrolize), the unit has advanced its pipeline of assets through national (FNR Jump) and EU (Horizon Europe and Eurostar) funding. Priority assets include:

• ecosystem service assessment tools for forest management (Multisilva) and Nature-Based Solutions (Nbenefit$) for ecosystem services assessment;
• “Refund” to support sustainability reporting requirements aligned with sustainable finance standards (EU Taxonomy, SFDR, CSRD);
• “Heat2power” and “Heat4steel” for industrial waste heat recovery;
• Twisco, a semantic digital twin enabling site managers and logisticians to optimize deliveries for several construction sites;
• DyPLCA for accurate, time-differentiated carbon footprinting;
• IGuess, a complete geospatial modelling platform for the simulation of transition plans at the regional scale. 

Furthermore, the unit contributes to transferring knowledge to the private sector (e.g. via its Betriber&Emwelt platform), working at times with national training providers like CNFPC.

These results are achieved by combining the expertise of five research groups.

The Sustainable Urban and Built Environment group simulates societal systems, enabling informed decisions on sustainable urban and built environments at the building and regional levels. It creates digital models for buildings and neighbourhoods, logistics and geo-computational platforms to improve sustainability and comfort performance. 

The Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis and Industrial Ecology groups develop sustainability metrics and methodologies to guide societal transitions. The LCSA group supports the design of policies, technologies, products and corporate strategies by quantifying their environmental, economic and social impacts from a lifecycle perspective. The IE group focuses on enhancing the circularity and resilience of material and energy flows at the product, industrial, and territorial scales, modelling interactions between techno-economic systems and the environment to advance circular economy principles. 

The Environmental Health group specializes in toxicology, studying the impact of pollution on ecosystems and human health in workplace and everyday contexts. The group develops in vitro models for human safety assessment and relevant model organisms for ecotoxicology, conducting exposure evaluations and hazard assessments. 

The Environmental Policies group provides scientific, regulatory and technical input to the definition and implements environmental policies that integrate its research outcomes and align with stakeholders' needs. The group supports authorities in policy-making and assists companies with regulatory compliance and environmental management, while providing expertise at the intersection of science, technology and policy.