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Descripción
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| Achieving sustainable development is the overarching goal of the current?s policy framework. Among the three pillars for sustainability, managing the planet?s natural resources is essential to promote environmental sustainability. In this sense, environmental accounting tools are needed to quantify and inform decision makers of potential environmental impacts and their implications. The Environmental Footprint (EF) has been proposed by the European Commission as a multi-criteria indicator to establish a common methodological approach to enable Member States and the private sector to assess, display and benchmark the environmental performance of products, services and companies based on a comprehensive assessment of environmental impacts over the life-cycle. Traditionally, Life-Cycle Assessments (LCA) have been carried out applying the process-based method. However, in this highly globalized world, the need to quantify all the impacts generated along the entire supply chain has increased the application of the Environmentally-Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output (EEMRIO) method. This method enables the tackling of the environmental impacts generated along the supply chain, as well as, their linkages between economic sectors and regions. The main objective of this research is to obtain the EF as a multi-criteria indicator quantified applying the EEMRIO method. To this end, the EF has been obtained for five case studies. The first three investigations refer to the three economic sectors. The primary sector is assessed by the calculation of the EF of an organic peri-urban orchard network, the secondary sector is evaluated by studying the EF of a company of wood parquet and the tertiary sector is assessed by obtaining the EF of a construction company carrying out a service of maintenance and conservation of a river. The fourth case study is based on the EF of the Spanish households? consumption and its effects on the imported goods. Finally, the fifth investigation is aimed at presenting a methodological advance by applying a hybrid-MRIO method to obtain the EF. These case studies serve as the starting point to evidence the strengths of implementing such a valuable indicator to evaluate the environmental impacts and propose measures to reduce them. According to this research, the EEMRIO method serves as a useful tool, which allows the identification and quantification of the environmental impacts. The main conclusion is that the EF is a novel indicator capable of capturing the entire picture concerning the environmental impacts and that its quantification applying the EEMRIO method provides an in-depth assessment of the sectorial and regional linkages. Sustainable development requires the effort of all the sectors and population and the implementation of the EF could aid to achieve this goal. | |
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Internacional
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ISBN
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Tipo de Tesis
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Doctoral |
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Calificación
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Sobresaliente |
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Fecha
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05/04/2019 |