Towards an integrated sustainability assessment of electric mobility scenarios.
Résumé
1. Goal:
From a socioeconomic point of view, transport sector occupies a major place in terms of employment, operation services and costs for users and society. Furthermore, it is considered as a major source of greenhouse gases and other pollutant emissions, mainly due to fossil fuel’s high consumption, thus contributing to environmental impacts such as acidification, eutrophication and climate change. There is an increasing need for promoting alternatives with lower environmental burdens. Among these alternatives, electric mobility is gaining attention from both governments and industrials to ensure a transition and lift this challenge facing our world.
A fair evaluation of the electric mobility systems sustainability requires accounting for the three dimensions of sustainable development, namely environmental, societal and economic dimensions. This work presents a new decision-support framework based on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodology.
The objective is to identify the most significant phase(s) of the product’s life cycle in terms of impacts. This will allow highlighting the benefits of the deployment of electric alternatives according to multiple use scenarios (personal, sharing services, etc.).
2. Methodology:
To conduct this evaluation, we propose a holistic approach that combines environmental and social Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), jointly with Life Cycle Costing (LCC). The approach can be applied to different scenarios of electric mobility systems to identify and quantify the impacts generated throughout the entire life cycle.
As a first step, we need to select the most significant impact categories for each dimension. Relevant literature of existing studies on electric mobility sustainability assessment was reviewed. This stage includes existing LCA frameworks applied on the automotive sector, company reports, research papers and guidelines from relevant institutions (e.g. European Commission, UNEP/SETAC).
The LCC will be used for the economic dimension to allow the quantification and compilation of each phase costs for a specific stakeholder. For the environmental dimension, a set of criteria are commonly recognized with a wide consensus which is not the case for the social dimension. To set the social impact categories, we have proposed two supplementary steps to complete the selection and refine the list of criteria identified from the previous studies. A risk analysis using a social hotspot identification was suggested, as well as a stakeholder consultation process that consists of interviewing different affected stakeholders (e.g. workers, local communities, users) or involved in the product’s life cycle (e.g. suppliers, local authorities, NGOs). The aim is to prioritize a set of criteria according to a scale-based approach (from low to high risk), allowing the identification of the most relevant impact categories for the evaluation.
3. Results:
Through the current study, we propose a framework for the definition of a set of sustainability indicators which could then be applied to achieve a quantitative assessment of electric mobility scenarios. As a perspective of this work, LCSA approach could be coupled with a multi-criteria decision- Analysis (MCDA) to constitute a decision-making tool. MCDA is a relevant methodology that based on a weighting process contribute to a consistent way of interpreting the evaluation results.