Life Cycle Management for Sustainable Regional Development

Dear Colleagues,

One of the major hurdles to sustainable development is the increasing scarcity of, and access to resources that provide society with essential needs for food, water, energy, and materials. There is broad international consensus that substantial changes are needed regarding the way resources are used in different production and consumption processes. Despite the extensive work needed to resolve this issue, many questions remain unanswered, including the important role of regions in paving the road to sustainable development in the framework of the agreed UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Regions are simultaneously providers and users of various types of resources. Regional development policies and actions can have major implications for local and international sustainability over the life-cycle of the resources themselves, and of the manufactured products that are derived from them.

Sustainable regional development depends on the adoption of systematic and long-term criteria for decision-making at different levels. Over the last years, a series of management tools and IT-solutions for the optimization of materials and product flows have come into wider use. A life-cycle approach has emerged as the most effective framework within which such tools can be applied in order to ensure that the key SDGs are properly considered.

Life-cycle assessment has become an effective optimization tool for products and materials, often applied in a business context. The use of various life-cycle tools for regional sustainability management is still evolving, suffering from lack of general awareness and experience in application. This Special Issue intends to bridge the current knowledge gap, providing a platform to present and discuss the ways in which life-cycle tools can be used to strengthen regional socio-economic planning, environment protection, and infrastructure development in a more sustainable manner.

In this Issue, we clearly distinguish between life-cycle assessment (LCA) as the analytical phase, and life-cycle management (LCM) as the phase of interventionist actions, whether on policy or on the ground. The LCA techniques identify the impacts of the current situation (i.e., the “problems”) and of the various alternative options (i.e., the “solutions”), whereas LCM provides a life-chain-based approach to intervention, federating the stakeholders along the resource or material life-cycle around agreed objectives, in order to achieve a more sustainable system outcome that optimizes the benefits and impacts along the entire life-chain and across all SDGs.

The editors of this Special Issue invite the presentation of life-cycle applications from both a scientific and a practical point of view, highlighting examples and case studies at a regional level. The applications should be relevant to private actors from different economic sectors, as well as to public representatives responsible for regional planning and administrative procedures. Preference will be given to discussions of regional needs, actions, and outcomes that embody a life-cycle approach rather than around individual products or business practices that are already extensively presented elsewhere.

 

Topics of interest are as follows:

• Sustainability of territorial resources and utilization by different sectors (industry, transports, tourism, agriculture, and energy) in the context of multiple SDGs, as well as possible secondary impacts.
• In-depth investigations of the theoretical linkages (including modelling and forecasting) and the impacts of policy instruments (e.g., market-based instruments) addressing regional material resources. Transition from LCA to LCM in the context of regional development.
• Assessment of the implications of behavioral-based policies for the economic sustainability of energy, water, and material resources.
• Use of life-cycle approaches to regional direct operations such as office practices, procurement, tendering, project management, building and construction, transport planning and provision, water and energy supply, chemicals use.
• Life-cycle approaches to land-use planning, urban planning, landscape preservation, biodiversity, and conservation.
• Life-cycle framework for circular economy and bio-economy policies and initiatives.
• Life-cycle management in key regional industry sectors such as construction, transport, energy, tourism, manufacturing, retail, and extractive industry.
• Life-cycle assessment of regional pollution, waste management, recycling, and prevention policies and operations.
• Regional needs and case studies of holistic action that incorporate life-cycle thinking and analysis, and address a wider range of SDGs.
• Identification of life-cycle methods and techniques that are capable of addressing the broader dimension of sustainability (i.e., non-materials flow issues).
• Case studies that highlight the life-chain aspect of various flows (materials, energy, labor, capital, etc.), and how life-cycle methods can take these into account.

It is intended that at the end of the publication process, the editors of this Special Issue will provide a synthesis to distil the key messages from the presented works into practical guidance points on how best to use life-cycle approaches to enhance sustainability in regional development.

Dr. Alberto Bezama
Prof. Raymond Cote
Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Ioppolo
Prof. Stefania Massari
Dr. Desta Mebratu
Dr. Tomas Rydberg
Prof. Dr. Guido Sonnemann
Dr. Fritz Balkau
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.