ABSTRACT
We live on a smaller planet than we like to believe. Expanding international trade, globalising industrial production, and increasing consumerism have combined to accelerate environmental degradation, putting the world’s ecosystems and our resource base under increasing pressure. Along the way, it has become clear that the older decision-making tools in common use are insufficient for the new development agenda of the twenty-first century. As already mentioned in Chapter 5, many ‘solutions’ simply moved the impacts to other environmental or geographical compartments and had a short-term perspective. Interventions often addressed the symptoms rather than the cause (e.g. the waste mountain that has to be ‘safely disposed of’). The situation called for a more rigorous approach to development planning based on upstream action, multi-criteria objectives, and a longer-term perspective. Life cycle management (LCM; Sonnemann and Margni 2015) promises to provide such a framework for action on many of our urgent sustainability challenges.
