Improve Taxonomy

[antaldaniel]

iotables: An R package for environmental and social impact assessment with input-output economics and carbon satellite accounts.

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[antaldaniel]

I am at odds with your taxonomy. Our project can be used for ESG reporting, in Europe that falls under the Corporate Social Responsibility Directive, but it is not only about carbon emissions and carbon intensities, etc. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards have five environmental and four social sustainability matter areas, including recycling (circularity), water, land biodiversity, and pollution besides climate change and CO2. I think that it would be logical to follow the European sustainabilty standards (which will form the basis of the international one after transatlantic reconciliation), because they are also in line with the UN GRI standard. Then, of course, this matters or domains can be split up by technologies, too. What we do is materiality testing, impact assessment and some estimation, and these functions are important in all sustainability areas.

[Ly0n]

@antaldaniel Thank you so much for your feedback on the taxonomy. I really appreciate feedback here because I find the topic very relevant but get little feedback here. You added it to the emission and carbon accounting section. The other Input/Output Tables we listed so far are part of Life Cycle Assessment. Isn't that perhaps the better place?

[antaldaniel]

@Ly0n Yes, well, that is the point. Our software has nothing to do with Life Cycle Assessment. I'll write an email.

[Ly0n]

Our software has nothing to do with Life Cycle Assessment

@antaldaniel Thank you for pointing that out. LCA and input-output analysis are certainly related but I would be very happy to split the industrial ecology area further. Do you see your project as part of industrial ecology? We could create a input-output analysis subcategory.

[antaldaniel]

No, I would not use industrial ecology at all. The European Union has established in the last years legally bindinig taxonomies that after transatlantic reconciliation will become de facto or de jure global standard in vocabulary and categorisation. The UN is also busy working on such things. I would really use official terminologies. What you call "Industrial ecology" in my mind is "Sustainability management", which has different aspects, just to give examples: performance management (we cover that), measurement (that, too), strategic planning and target setting (that, too) and reporting-audit.

Most of the developed world economy is service-sector oriented, so the industrial would be very misleading. For example, we so far only worked with service sector companies. Agriculture also has a very huge footprint, too. The current UN and EU standards in sustainability management relate to the entire value chain, i.e. upstream supply chain, downstream buyers and their use, workforce, supplier workfoce, affected communities and end-users. So "industrial ecology" is a very small part of this.

In all jurisdictions, what you do is covered under ESG, which is also includes social sustiainability. If you do not want to cover that, that we are talking about environmental sustainability, which in the European Sustainability Reporting Standards has five areas, this should be reflected: climate, water, land use, circularity and pollution that is not greenhouse gases.

Your current strucure mixes three things: scientific research, public policy and micro-level, enterprise policy. This is a good thing, because according to these evolving EU-UN standards public policy and enterprise policies should follow science-based targets, so all should be covered. The fact that our iotables (and other product) has no place in your repo shows that a major rethink would be needed. In my opinion, it should be based on UN-EU policies and categories, and all the current content would fall into their place, but would be differently organised.

[Ly0n]

@antaldaniel I agree with most of what you have said.

I would really use official terminologies.

When it comes to language, sometimes a top-down approach is required, but since we can't be experts in all particular subject area, we have so far used the bottom-up approach by grouping projects based on the topics/categories used in the project descriptions and READMEs.

What you call "Industrial ecology" in my mind is "Sustainability management", which has different aspects, just to give examples.

The problem with "sustainability management" is that it is a very bad term for search engines. It has a lot of overlap with different areas and people will understand very different things by it.

In all jurisdictions, what you do is covered under ESG, which is also includes social sustainability.

We only focus on environmental sustainability. The problem with including all ESG or SDG aspects is that every open source project can be considered environmentally, socially or governance-relevant in some way. At least the environmental aspect can still be clearly delineated.

The fact that our iotables (and other product) has no place in your repo shows that a major rethink would be needed. In my opinion, it should be based on UN-EU policies and categories, and all the current content would fall into their place, but would be differently organised.

You see the whole area from a business and government perspective. I would love to apply such taxonomies to the current dataset, and we should! However, it should be noted that a very large proportion of the projects listed here are in the field of energy and earth science. Companies and governments unfortunately play a very small role here and do not use this software. Using a taxonomy or structure that is more in line with the IPCC report might also be a way forward.

The top-down approach to information technology just does not work! Open source has shown in many other industries (such as AI, cloud, operating systems, web technology, etc.) how to create standards with open source. Unfortunately, this is ignored by large parts of the ESG rating and reporting industry, which means that almost all figures coming from this area are useless from a scientific point of view. There are just not enough open source projects and open developments leading to standardization in this area, especially on the part of companies, but also cities. So I'm very pleased that you're working on a project like this, even though it's a exception.

This is a good thing, because according to these evolving EU-UN standards public policy and enterprise policies should follow science-based targets, so all should be covered.

I would go further. Companies should participate in science when it comes to environmental sustainability, and they should do so in a reproducible and traceable way. This is where the open sustainability aspect comes in, which we also talked about in our last report. The scientific community has learned that open science is necessary to produce robust figures about our environment. Sooner or later, the business world will learn the same thing, given the increasing number of greenwashing scandals we can expect next year.