Life cycle sustainability assessment of emerging mobility technologies: perspective, challenges, and future directions

Nuri C. Onat and Murat Kucukvar

Chapter 22 in Handbook on Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, 2024, pp 304-315 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Emerging mobility technologies come with uncertainties in terms of their social, economic, and environmental impacts. Considering the potential impacts of emerging transportation systems, life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) can be considered a practical framework to analyze environmental, economic, and social impacts of products and/or systems considering their life cycles. In this chapter, the importance of sustainability assessment of emerging mobility technologies is emphasized by conducting a systematic review of LCSA case studies in the mobility sector. We present a detailed analysis of papers based on the application area, reporting country, coverage of social/economic/environmental indicators, consideration of product, regional/national or global level impacts, presence of ripple or rebound effects, stakeholder involvement, and consideration of mechanisms (interconnection mechanisms, scenario analysis, uncertainty/sensitivity analysis). This chapter reveals important gaps in research and practice such as lack of integrated and macro-level modeling approaches, limited coverage of socio-economic indicators, underrepresented developing world, and limited coverage of end-of-life management strategies. We conclude that systemic use of LCSA is vital to explore trade-offs and inform sustainable development policies, initiatives, and decisions, and can provide insights at early design stages and later for managing and regulating emerging transportation technologies globally.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Environment; Geography; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800378650.00033 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20336_22

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com
sales@e-elgar.co.uk

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla (darrel@e-elgar.co.uk).