Manfred Lenzen, Chris Dey, Joy Murray
Professor Manfred Lenzen, Dr Chris Dey and Dr Joy Murray lead the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.
Integrated Sustainability Analysis
The price of a product or service is usually obvious, but how can one quantify the real cost: the cost to society and the environment?
It’s a question the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis (ISA) is determined to answer. Comprising wide expertise, ISA seeks to develop useful tools and methodologies to address sustainability issues, and offer highlevel consulting and educational programs and materials to government at all levels, NGOs, private companies and individuals in Australia and overseas. ISA’s philosophy is that producers and consumers are responsible for contributing to pollution, waste, climate change and resource depletion. Ascribing responsibility to both makes not only intuitive sense, but also holds the promise of policies that are viewed as fair by a wide range of stakeholders.
Recognising this point, ISA has developed a single analysis tool, based on a Multi-Region Input-Output (MRIO) account, which can assess the impacts of Australian industry in unsurpassed detail. It encompasses all states and territories and distinguishes 350 industry sectors and their impacts across more than 1000 social, economic and environmental indicators such as energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land disturbance, employment and family income – more than 10 million account entries.
A principal advantage of the ISA framework is that it provides for valid comparisons – enabling the complete upstream ‘footprint’ of an organisation to be calculated for all types of indicators in the same way. For example, a company can calculate the total embodied greenhouse gas emissions (including those in the full supply chain) and compare this with total employment in the supply chain.
While the methodology and techniques developed by ISA are extremely sophisticated, feedback from training programs and dialogue with users has ensured the translation of this innovative research into sought-after tools for groups and individuals at all levels.