International Summer Workshop on Life-Cycle Approaches to Sustainable Regional Development
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 through a ‘summer school’likeinternational workshopmixing introductions, lectures, student presentations, problem-solving working groups, software courses,discussion sessions, panels, synthesis blocks and social events. A textbook resulting from the series of LCSS will be published in August 2016 by Routledge.
The aim of the workshop 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. In particular, relying on the bases of the Life-Cycle Approach, Organisational LCA and Social LCA tools will be analyzed.
This year’s focus is how the ongoing evolution of life cycle assessment, by including social aspects in the context of life cycle sustainability assessment and its use for organisations, in a context of life cycle management, can support sustainable regional development.
Language:
The official language of the Workshop is English