Towards an overall framework to assess the sustainability of the use of natural resources

Over the years, the sustainable supply of natural resources for the global economy has drawn increasing political interest. The efficient use of resources is a fundamental issue for sustainability assessment, entailing and affecting environmental, economic and social aspects. It is not surprising that they hold a central role in many different sustainability assessment frameworks. In conventional life cycle assessment (LCA), natural resources are considered as one area of protection (AoP). It is well recognized that the typical approach of this AoP starts from the provisioning function of resources, but natural resources however are also dealt with in totally different frameworks. If one starts from an ecological point of view, provisioning services is only one role natural resources fulfill next to regulating, cultural and supporting functions, all captured by the Ecosystems Services framework. The access to certain resources is a further issue of concern for policy. The identification of the so-called Critical Raw Materials for EU took into account their economic importance for specific sectors and supply risk, the latter being focused on concentration of supply from producing countries showing poor governance and low environmental standards, in turn mitigated by substitutability and recyclability of the materials. Further on, there is no doubt that resource exploitation and use may affect several social aspects (e.g. working conditions) as can be identified by the Social Hotspot Database, and that emissions generated along their use in supply chains (from extraction to manufacturing, use and end of life) might affect human health and natural ecosystems, other two areas of protection in conventional LCA. This presentation proposes an integration of the aforementioned frameworks aiming at depicting an overall framework to assess the sustainability of the use of natural resources.