The ISIE-ISSST 2017 Conference
President Edgar Hertwich speaking at the conference closing ceremony
The 9th biennial conference of the International Society (ISIE) and the 25th annual conference of the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology (ISSST) were held jointly at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 25-29 June 2017.
The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Science in Support of Sustainable and Resilient Communities’. The conference highlighted the importance of 1) research in Industrial Ecology and complex sustainable systems, in governance and design of interrelated human-natural communities, 2) understanding of the complexity of systems and the responses of the systems to perturbations, and 3) how to apply knowledge and develop holistic solutions across different institutional settings and spatial and temporal scales. Some of the important topics of this conference include:
Complexity, resilience and sustainability
Life cycle sustainability assessment
Environmentally and socially-extended input-output analysis
Socio-economic metabolism and material flow analysis
Industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial development
Sustainable food, energy and water systems, nutrient material flows and footprints
Advances in methods (LCA, social impact assessment, resilience analysis)
Human behaviour and rebound
Murilo Pagotto and Tianchu Lu from the Research Group in Industrial Ecology and Circular Economy at the University of Queensland were accepted respectively for paper and poster presentation at the conference. Murilo’s proposed topic for the presentation was ‘Can We Feed the World? An Integrated Framework for Sustainability Assessment of a Production System in the Australian Food Industry’. Tianchu’s poster title was ‘Enhancing the Understanding and Practice of Circular Economy and Related Methods on Interrelationships among Environmental Sustainability, Food Systems and Human Diet through Systems Thinking Approach’.
Throughout the five-day conference, there were some insightful and innovative sessions and presentations that are closely related to the current works of our research group. Below is a quick summarise:
The workshop of ‘Towards a Theoretical Framework for the Industrial Ecology of Socioecological Systems’ was hosted by Stefan Pauliuk from University of Freiburg, Germany, who later also won the Graedel Prize (Junior Best Paper Prize 2015) of the ISIE with his paper, ‘A General System Structure and Accounting Framework for Socioeconomic Metabolism’. During the workshop, the participants were introduced with the metatheory and approaches that support the common ground of a theoretical framework that bridges the engineering and social science approach to industrial ecology. The participants then raised questions about the potential caveats of the framework, and discussed topics including how specific or generic the framework should be, and how to make the framework operational in daily disciplinary work. The participants agreed to continue this discussion in the future.
A special session titled ‘Sustainability, assessment, communication, and complexity in the new era’ was hosted by Caroline Taylor from University of California-Berkeley and joined by Marcelle McManus (University of Bath), Joule Bergerson (University of Calgary) and Hanna Breetz (Arizona State University). In this session, speakers discussed the difficulties, including communication and uncertainty, in the assessment of sustainability, climate and renewable energy. Talks focused on scope in sustainability, uncertainty in LCA, operationalisation and uptake of results, and shone a light on the ways in which complexity, uncertainty, climate change, science communication will and are shaping life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) now and in an uncertain future. Speakers also drew additional attention to the paradigm development from end-of-pipe behaviour to life cycle thinking and to system thinking.
In many sessions and presentations, the uncertainty in LCA and data quality, reliability and characterisation were the most frequent focuses. Sources of the uncertainty, including aleatory and epistemic ones, were identified and analysed, based on the specific scenarios of individual studies. Special sessions such as ‘Data Needs for Sustainability Assessments’ had researchers including Jeremy Gregory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Bhavik Bakshi (The Ohio State University), Anne-Marie Boulay (LIRIDE, Sherbrooke University and CIRAIG, Polytechnique Montreal), Lise Laurin (EarthShift Global), Daniel D Moran (Industrial Ecology Programme, NTNU), Rupert Myers (Yale University), Gregor Wernet (ecoinvent) and Yi Yang (CSRA Inc.) together to talk about data-related issues in fields of product/process-based LCA, Social LCA, Ecosystem Services, Material Flow Analysis, Environmentally Extended Input-Output analysis and Multi-regional Input-Output analysis.
The work of the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) was introduced and appreciated during the special session of ‘Method Development in EEIO – Novel Advances and Best Practices’ hosted by Tommy Wiedmann from University of New South Wales.
Other innovative highlights at the conference include but are not limited to Dana Boyer’s (University of Minnesota) presentation on impacts of future urban food senarios; the work of Graham Aid (Ragn-Sells AB) and Christopher Davis (University of Groningen) on computer assisted survey of value pathways in existing literature, in order to study secondary resources in the bio-based economy; and Ben Zhu’s (Delft University of Technology) presentation on using Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) and theories from complex system modelling and evolutionary economy to improve the understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in socio-technical systems and micro-foundations of socio-technological theories.
At the closing ceremony of the conference, Edgar Hertwich, the President of the ISIE and the Director of the Centre for Industrial Ecology at Yale University pointed out some of the exciting current development and directions for future development of the methods of Industrial Ecology, such as System Dynamics, ABM, data science, and particularly, Integrated Sustainability Scenarios. It was also announced that the next ISIE 2019 conference will be held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and there will be regional meetings held in between the formal biennial conferences.
Andrew Morlet, Chief Executive Officer of The Ellen MacArthur Foundation speaking at the panel discussion of ‘Industrial Ecology and Circular Economy: A Dialog with Chief Executive Andrew Morlet of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’, moderated by Prof. Marian Chertow at Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
