Livia Cabernard


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Cabernard

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Livia

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0000-0001-7531-3560

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Publications 1 - 10 of 16
  • Environmental impacts of natural resource use
    Item type: Book Chapter
    Hellweg, Stefanie; Pfister, Stephan; Cabernard, Livia; et al. (2019)
    International Resource Panel ~ Global Resources Outlook 2019
    Decoupling economic growth and environmental degradation requires sustainable sourcing and management of resources over the whole life cycle. While the mass-flow indicators of chapter 2 are very useful for understanding the environmental pressures from material consumption, information about the environmental impacts of resource use and resource management practices is also needed to support policymaking for the sustainable use of natural resources (Voet et al., 2005). This chapter focuses on the environmental consequences of resource extraction and processing. It illustrates the legitimate need for appropriate policy to manage natural resources, which is required if we are to remain within the safe operating space (Steffen et al., 2015) and achieve the SDGs.
  • A highly resolved MRIO database for analyzing environmental footprints and Green Economy Progress
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Pfister, Stephan (2021)
    Science of The Total Environment
    Moving towards a greener economy requires detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains. Environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis plays a key role in providing this information, but current databases are limited in their spatial (e.g. EXIOBASE3) or sectoral resolution (e.g. Eora26 and GTAP) as well as their indicator coverage. Here, we present an automated, transparent, and comparably time-efficient approach to improve the resolution, quality, and indicator coverage of an existing MRIO database. Applied on EXIOBASE3, we disaggregate and improve the limited spatial resolution by weighting each element with country and sector specific shares derived from Eora26, FAOSTAT, and previous studies. The resolved database covers 189 countries, 163 sectors, and a cutting-edge set of environmental and socio-economic indicators from the years 1995 to 2015. The importance of our improvements is highlighted by the EU-27 results, which reveal a significant increase in the EU's water stress and biodiversity loss footprint as a result of the spatial disaggregation and regionalized assessment. In 2015, a third of the EU's water stress and half of its biodiversity loss footprint was caused in the countries aggregated as rest of the world in EXIOBASE3. This was mainly attributed to the EU's food imports, which induce comparably high water stress and biodiversity loss in Egypt and Madagascar, respectively. In a second example, we use our database to add carbon, water stress and biodiversity loss footprints to the Green Economy Progress (GEP) Measurement Framework. Most countries have not achieved their environmental target and many countries, facing strong future population growth, show increasing footprints. Our results demonstrate that far more action is needed to move towards a greener economy globally, especially through supply chain management. The attached database provides detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains to plan efficient strategies for a greener economy.
  • Hotspots of Mining-Related Biodiversity Loss in Global Supply Chains and the Potential for Reduction through Renewable Electricity
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Pfister, Stephan (2022)
    Environmental Science & Technology
    Anticipated infrastructure growth and energy transition may exacerbate biodiversity loss through increased demand for mining products. This study uses an enhanced multiregional input–output database (REX, Resolved EXIOBASE) and supply chain impact mapping (SCIM) method to assess global biodiversity loss associated with mining-related land use. We identify hotspots in the supply chain of mining products, compare the impact of fossil and renewable electricity, and estimate the share of mining in total global impacts. We found that half of the global mining-related biodiversity loss occurs in Indonesia, Australia, and New Caledonia. Major international trade flows of embodied biodiversity loss involve Indonesia’s coal exports to China and India, New Caledonia’s nickel exports to Japan and Australia, and Australia’s iron and bauxite exports to China. Key end-consumers include China’s growing infrastructure and the EU’s and USA’s household consumption. Electricity generation accounted for 10% of global mining-related biodiversity loss in 2014. The impact of coal-fired electricity was 10 times higher than that of renewables per unit of electricity generated. Globally, mining contributes to less than 1% of the total land use-related biodiversity loss, which is dominated by agriculture. Our results provide transparency in sourcing more sustainable mining products and underline synergies in fostering renewables to meet local biodiversity and global climate targets.
  • Mikroplastik in Abwasser und Gewässern
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Durisch-Kaiser, Edith; Vogel, Jean-Claude; et al. (2016)
    Aqua & Gas
  • Biodiversity impacts of recent land-use change driven by increases in agri-food imports
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Pfister, Stephan; Hellweg, Stefanie (2024)
    Nature Sustainability
    Land-use change such as the conversion of natural habitat to agricultural land has been a major driver of global biodiversity loss, prompting efforts at biodiversity restoration. However, restoration measures in certain areas can shift the detrimental biodiversity impacts elsewhere through the outsourcing of agri-food supply chains to biodiverse regions. This study examines the link between biodiversity impacts from land-use change and shifts in global supply chains from 1995 to 2022 by introducing a marginal allocation into multiregional input-output analysis. Almost 80% of recent global land-use change impacts were associated with increased agri-food exports from Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia + Pacific (excluding China). Conversely, increased imports to China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East accounted for almost 60% of recent global land-use change impacts from a consumption perspective, despite decreasing domestic impacts through restoration. Decreasing biodiversity impacts in temperate and arid regions have been partially achieved by outsourcing agri-food supply to tropical biodiversity hotspots. This results in a cumulated global extinction rate (1.4% global potential species loss since 1995), exceeding the planetary boundary by about fifty times, thus highlighting the need for policies incentivizing habitat protection in tropical regions and sustainable sourcing in agri-food supply chains.
  • Creating transparency in global value chains and their environmental impacts to support sustainability policies
    Item type: Doctoral Thesis
    Cabernard, Livia (2021)
    Climate change, air pollution, water stress, and biodiversity loss are the most important global environmental impacts that need to be addressed in the coming decades. This thesis shows that most of these impacts are caused by the extraction and processing of materials, food, and fuels, summarized as “materials” here. With the demand for materials expected to double by 2050, improved sustainability policies are critical. As many materials are produced in another country than ultimately consumed, such policies require detailed information on global value chains and their environmental impacts. Multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis plays a key role in providing this information, but several research gaps exist. One gap is the lack of an accurate method for assessing scope 3 impacts of materials, industries, and nations, including cumulative upstream and direct impacts (for any impact category). Also, no method exists for analyzing downstream impacts, which is a particular issue for greenhouse gas (GHG) and particulate matter (PM) emissions of fuels, such as coal. Another gap is the limited spatial and sectoral resolution and the incomplete coverage of sustainability indicators in current MRIO databases. This includes the lack of regionalized assessment of water and land use impacts. Due to these gaps, an accurate and extensive environmental assessment of materials is missing both globally and nationally. The objective of this thesis was to provide an improved MRIO method and database for creating transparency in global value chains and their impacts, to support sustainable policy-making. For this purpose, a method was developed that allows assessing the scope 3 impacts of any sector and region of an MRIO database (Chapter 2), tracking them along the global value chain (for GHG emissions and any other impact category), and analyzing downstream impacts (for GHG and PM emissions of fuels, Chapter 4 and 5). Furthermore, an automated, transparent, and time-efficient approach was developed to improve the resolution and quality of an existing MRIO database (Chapter 3). It was applied to merge the global MRIO databases EXIOBASE3 and Eora26 and add data from FAOSTAT and previous studies to create an MRIO database with high spatial (189 countries), sectoral (163 sectors), and temporal resolution (year 1995–2015). Finally, a set of sustainability indicators was implemented into the database: Climate change from GHG emissions, health impacts from PM emissions (primary and secondary particles), water stress and land-use-related biodiversity loss (both regionalized), value added, and number of workers (Chapter 2–5). The importance, versatility, and broad applicability of the improved method and database was illustrated by several application examples. These include a case study on material production globally (Chapter 2) and for the G20 (Chapter 4). An in-depth analysis of the role of coal combustion is provided in Chapter 4 for the production of metals and construction materials, and in Chapter 5 for global plastics production. A detailed analysis of the food supply chain and the related water and land footprint is shown in Chapter 3 for the European Union (EU). The case study on global material production (Chapter 2) showed that previous MRIO methods either underestimated or overestimated the environmental impacts of material production by 20–60%. The improved method found that material production causes half of global GHG emissions, one-third of global PM health impacts, and, because of biomass production, more than 90% of global water stress and land-use related biodiversity loss. Since 1995, global material-related impacts have increased by 52% (GHG emissions), 56% (PM health impacts), and 22% (water stress). While high-income regions mainly use materials for private consumption, emerging economies use a large share of materials for infrastructure build-up. Although the latter was the main driver of the rising material-related GHG emissions, material-related carbon footprints of high-income regions are still several times higher than those of emerging economies on a per-capita level (year 2015). This underscores the need to decouple environmental impacts from economic growth and to promote sufficiency measures. Material production for building infrastructure in emerging economies, mainly China, has also driven the increase in the G20's overall carbon footprint (Chapter 4). Since 1995, China’s carbon footprint of metals and construction materials has quadrupled, causing more than 10% of global GHG emissions in 2015. Similarly, the case study on plastics (Chapter 5) showed that plastics-related carbon footprints of China’s transportation, Indonesia’s electronics industry, and India’s construction sector have increased more than 50-fold. Thus, measures to reduce, reuse, recycle, and substitute high-impact materials are critical to mitigate the environmental impacts of the expected economic growth in developing countries. Reliance on coal to produce materials has been another key driver of the G20’s rising carbon footprint (Chapter 4). In 2015, half of global coal was used for the G20’s production of metals and construction materials, the majority in China and India. Thus, 85% of India’s total domestic coal was used for the production of these materials in 2015. This points to the need for a rapid phase-out of coal and a shift to renewables in the G20’s material production chain. Similarly, it was found that due to the growth in plastics production in coal-based economies, the carbon and PM health footprint of plastics has doubled since 1995 (Chapter 5). In 2015, 6% of global coal electricity was used for plastics production. Moreover, plastics accounted for 4.5% of global GHG emissions. This is higher than expected, as previous studies did not account for the increased reliance on coal energy in the plastics sector. It was also assumed that equal amounts of oil were used as fuel and feedstock in plastics production, while this thesis shows that twice as much fossil carbon is combusted as fuel than contained as feedstock. Even in a worst-case scenario where all plastics were incinerated, the production stage would still contribute most to plastics-related GHG and PM emissions. This means that previous studies have underestimated the relative significance of the production versus the disposal phase, and thus the enormous potential to reduce the carbon and PM health footprint of plastics by renewable energy investments. High-income regions have significantly contributed to the rising environmental impacts by outsourcing the extraction of resources and processing into materials to lower-income regions with less stringent environmental policies, more water stress, and high biodiversity (Chapter 2–5). Due to increasing imports of plastics from coal-based economies, the share of the plastic-related carbon footprint generated abroad increased to 67% in the EU, 79% in the USA, 90% in Canada, and 95% in Australia in 2015 (Chapter 5). Similarly, the case study on the EU’s water-stress and land-use related biodiversity loss footprint found that most of the associated impacts are caused abroad (Chapter 3). This is mainly attributed to food imports from emerging and developing countries where water is scarce (e.g. Egypt) and biodiversity is high (e.g. Madagascar). The improved spatial resolution (189 countries instead of 49 regions) and regionalized impact assessment led to a significant increase in the EU’s water and land impact footprint induced abroad. These results highlight the need for expanding environmental policy initiatives (e.g., the Paris Agreement and the EU’s Green Deal) from production-based to consumption-based accounting to foster improved supply chain management. This includes the investment in clean energy production throughout the supply chain and the use of regional comparative advantage for reducing water stress and biodiversity loss. In addition to environmental impacts, the value added and workforce associated with material production are also unequally distributed around the world. Trade in materials reinforces this imbalance (Chapter 2–5). It was shown that although high-income regions strongly rely on low-paid work abroad due to material imports (mainly food), they generate most of the associated value added inland (e.g., due to food processing). The extent of this imbalance was highlighted, e.g., in the G20 case study: Since 2011, the number of workers employed globally to meet Australia’s material demand is greater than the number of workers employed in the entire Australian economy (Chapter 4). Similarly, the plastics case study found that although 70% of the workforce required for plastics consumption in the EU was employed abroad, 80% of the associated value added was generated domestically (year 2015), as only the low-paid steps in the plastics value chain have been outsourced (Chapter 5). The method and database of this thesis are open access and can be applied by researchers, industries, and policy makers for a more accurate impact assessment of various materials, commodities, industries, and nations. The method is available as a software tool that can be used to track the scope 3 impacts of industries and nations for a range of sustainability indicators along the global value chain (Chapter 2). Future work can apply the approach of Chapter 3 to improve the spatial, sectoral, and temporal resolution and quality of the database by integrating further MRIO databases and data sources. Also, future work is needed to incorporate detailed bottom-up inventories and use remote sensing data to improve the resolution and coverage of life-cycle inventories.
  • Urban mining: The relevance of information, transaction costs and externalities
    Item type: Journal Article
    Van der Merwe, Antoinette; Cabernard, Livia; Günther, Isabel (2023)
    Ecological Economics
    Mobile phones are one of the most commonly owned personal electronic devices and they contain about 15 different metals, mostly extracted with severe negative environmental externalities. Sourcing metals from retired mobile phones, i.e. urban mining, could alleviate these effects. In this study, we analyse the viability of urban mining in Switzerland using a representative survey of 2,500 Swiss respondents and an experiment with 15,000 employees of a Swiss institution. We estimate that there are around seven million unused phones with embedded gold worth USD 10 million in Switzerland. People do not particularly value their retired phones: 22% do not know why they keep it, and 40% said they are willing to sell their old device for less than USD 5. We further find that while informational treatments do not change recycling rates, reducing transaction costs of recycling double return rates from 2.1% to 5.5%. Lastly, while urban mining is not economically viable if we only consider the market value of embedded metals, it is profitable when taking into account the environmental cost of producing a new mobile device with metals from a primary mine.
  • Improved sustainability assessment of the G20’s supply chains of materials, fuels, and food
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Pfister, Stephan; Hellweg, Stefanie (2022)
    Environmental Research Letters
  • Growing environmental footprint of plastics driven by coal combustion
    Item type: Journal Article
    Cabernard, Livia; Pfister, Stephan; Oberschelp, Christopher; et al. (2022)
    Nature Sustainability
    Research on the environmental impacts from the global value chain of plastics has typically focused on the disposal phase, considered most harmful to the environment and human health. However, the production of plastics is also responsible for substantial environmental, health and socioeconomic impacts. We show that the carbon and particulate-matter-related health footprint of plastics has doubled since 1995, due mainly to growth in plastics production in coal-based economies. Coal-based emissions have quadrupled since 1995, causing almost half of the plastics-related carbon and particulate-matter-related health footprint in 2015. Plastics-related carbon footprints of China’s transportation, Indonesia’s electronics industry and India’s construction sector have increased more than 50-fold since 1995. In 2015, plastics caused 4.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, 6% of global coal electricity is used for plastics production. The European Union and the United States have increasingly consumed plastics produced in coal-based economies. In 2015, 85% of the workforce required for plastics consumed by the European Union and the United States was employed abroad, but 80% of the related value added was generated domestically. As high-income regions have outsourced the energy-intensive steps of plastics production to coal-based economies, renewable energy investments throughout the plastics value chain are critical for sustainable production and consumption of plastics.
  • Digital transformation-life cycle assessment of digital services, multifunctional devices and cloud computing
    Item type: Other Conference Item
    Itten, René; Hischier, Roland; Andrae, Anders S.G.; et al. (2020)
    The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Publications 1 - 10 of 16