Welcome to the Sustainability Assessment Unit!
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The mission of the Sustainability Assessment Unit is to foster sustainability principles in EU policies by developing an integrated assessment framework towards environmental quality and socio-economic viability in the decision making process.
The Unit is committed to applying new approaches and methods to perform integrated sustainability assessment and impact analyses across policies. Our activities will support the provision of knowledge, reference data and examples of best practices, the design of scenarios for modelling and foresight tools, and serve as a research base for policy recommendations. This implies taking a holistic view, often following a life-cycle thinking approach.
Two existing integrative platforms are at the core of the development:
- The European Land Use Modelling Platform (LUMP) for the evaluation of management options in response to policy and socio-economic scenarios;
- The European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment for the provision of coherence, quality assurance and related information across policies and in business by developing guidelines and tools specific to product groups.
Both platforms will further integrate and interact with sectoral and thematic modelling facilities within and outside the JRC.
The activities of the Unit are targeted towards the JRC objectives regarding sustainable management of natural resources, and contribute to the implementation of the policies foreseen within the Europe 2020 Strategy and more precisely to the flagship initiatives such as ‘A Resource Efficient Europe’, the ‘Sustainable Consumption and Production and Sustainable Industrial Policy Action Plan’, the Strategy for ‘Innovating for sustainable growth: a Bioeconomy for Europe’ and in the area of eco-innovation supporting green growth.
The specific aims of the work of the Unit are to:
- ensure that the costs and the benefits of EU policy measures are well balanced in the frame of an environmentally sustainable economy, following a life cycle approach for assessments. This involves analysing the demand and supply cycle of natural resources, developing guidelines on best practices in life-cycle assessments and enhancing the European Reference Life Cycle Data Base and Network;
- support the development of new paths of growth focusing on the new opportunities provided by a wider concept of green economy. This will include establishing future directions for the scenario analyses of European natural resources, investigating methodological aspects of sustainability thinking related to standardisation, monitoring tools and innovative modelling approaches;
- boost the economic value of ecological services in a context of integrated and efficient management of natural resources.
The work of the Unit is carried out in two Research Actions:
Action 22005 - Environmental Assessment and the Sustainable Use of Resources (ENSURE) contributes to the knowledge base of the European Commission’s 2020 Flagship on Resource Efficiency by developing and demonstrating new approaches for integrated social, economic and environmental assessments.
Action 22009 - INTEgrated Sustainability Assessment: scenarios, platform and indicators (INTESA) - Building a platform for integrated sustainability assessment: using methodologies, tools and research-based analyses for specific policy needs
Contact Info
Unit Head:
Constantin Ciupagea - Tel.:+39-0332-7895132 E-mail: constantin.ciupagea(at)jrc.ec.europa.eu
