Life cycle approaches to sustainable regional development

About

The series of LCSS -Life Cycle Summer Schools - is dedicated to exploring the applicability of life cycle approaches to sustainable regional development. It seeks to integrate the usual focus of life cycle assessment and life cycle management on products from corporations into the framework of regional socio-economic development challenges and decision-making. It is useful to those seeking to work towards a regional circular economy that privileges local product and infrastructure development with suppliers and markets at the regional level, in a context of sustainable innovation. Every year the LCSS explores a topic combining selected subjects, lectures, student presentations, problem-solving working groups, discussion sessions, panels, synthesis blocks and social events. A textbook resulting from the series of LCSS has been published in December 2016 by Routledge.

Course leader

Stefania Massari, Guido Sonnemann , Fritz Balkau

Target group

Master or postgraduate students as well young professionals with an engineering or natural sciences background who may already have a basic knowledge of life cycle assessment and other approaches
Master or postgraduate students as well young professionals with a management and administration background who may already have a basic knowledge on regional development

Professionals working at regional level who seek to expand their understanding of how life cycle approaches could be applied to promote sustainable regional development using life cycle approaches

The target number of participants is 30 (maximum number); the minimum number is 15.

Course aim

The aim of the summer school is to familiarize students with tools which are useful to understand and evaluate the dimensions of sustainability of a wide range of activities.

The competencies acquired during the Course will enable the students to understand not only how the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) could be used in different contexts and situations in order to face the challenges of sustainable development, but also how some other complementary tools may help organizations and public administrations to improve their performance.

The 2017 edition of the summer school will explore topics such as LCA approaches that address broader sustainability issues, mapping regional materials flows, agent-based LCA for mobility, life cycle techniques for landscape and land-use, as well as building a LCM toolbox for SMEs. These instruments will be examined also for their role in strengthening regional programmes in circular economy and in building a bio-economy.

Fee info