Three research organizations: CIRAD, CEMAGREF and the University of Montpellier, under the aegis of the ELSA platform, are organizing an International Seminar on Social LCA: Recent developments in social impact assessment of products life cycle , on 5 and 6 May 2011 a tAgropolis International (Montpellier, France).

"From cradle to grave ", the shock slogan of LCA (life cycle assessment), neatly sums up the concept: from raw material extraction, through consumption, to waste, in other words measuring the environmental impact of a product or supply chain, from start to finish, in the agricultural field in both North and South.

However, the sustainability of a supply chain or a process is also measured through its three components: social, economic and environmental. This means considering the effects of an activity on the wellbeing of individuals and of the society in which they live. This is the crux of social LCA.

As Denis Loeillet, a CIRAD researcher, explains: "It was in 2008, when the finger was unfairly being pointed at tropical products, which are transported over long distances before reaching European consumers' plates, that we came up with the idea of also studying the economic and social consequences all along the chain of production, transport and consumption chains for such products ". He adds: "This was the start of social LCA (SLCA) at CIRAD ".

Since then, numerous scientific projects relating to the assessment of impacts on man and society have emerged: a project funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) to assess the sustainability of tomato supply chains, a thesis on banana production in Africa and Latin America or animal supply chains in Réunion, a project to measure the sustainability of food supply chains in the French overseas regions, etc.

Within the ELSA platform, the teams in Montpellier (CIRAD, CEMAGREF, INRA, SupAgro, UM1, etc) make up one of the leading research groups on the topic in Europe.
The social LCA seminar in Montpellier follows on from the one held in May 2010 in Denmark, and is primarily intended to bring together researchers and industrialists interested in the topic.

The organizers will be welcoming contributors from Europe and the United States, to take stock of the different social LCA approaches. The aim is in fact to recall the various schools of thought that have structured the life cycle assessment movement and discuss the models and methods being developed (CSR-type approach, attribute LCA, pathway LCA) so as to define the scope of SLCA more clearly.

See seminar programme.

Agropolis international will be providing an Internet link to enable anyone interested to follow the debates throughout the week.

Category: Coming up