Achieving Comprehensive Social Impact Assessment

Just as environmental impact assessments miss important environmental affects and are often augmented by a risk assessment, the inclusion of social impacts in an assessment method will miss important social impacts. Because social impact assessment is a relatively new concept, there will be a learning curve over which the methods will get better and more comprehensive. In addition, social impacts are less tangible than environmental impacts, and may never be as well modeled using a life cycle assessment approach. These impacts can also be assessed using a risk assessment, this time an assessment of social risk.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is often criticized for missing major environmental impacts. As an example, brominated flame retardants, even those which are no longer manufactured due to the possibility of risk to human health, are ignored by all major impact assessment methods. The risks to fish migrations in hydroelectric power generation is also ignored. To ensure that these important environmental impacts are not ignored in major decision-making, most LCA practitioners recommend a complimentary risk assessment to capture these other impacts.

Social LCA has even more potential for missing impacts. Cultural biases mean that one society's benefit is another's bane. We have seen, however, that social risk assessment as applied using Total Cost Assessment (TCA) has done an excellent job at digging out the potential social impacts of a behavior or decision. Applying TCA to several projects, social concerns have come to the forefront: concerns over noise, immediate human health impacts, disease transmittal from one location to another, and local employment, for example. While TCA is only one example of a social risk assessment, we will show how this method has brought the issue of social sustainability side by side with economic and environmental sustainability. By including this type of assessment as a compliment to the LCA methodology at the outset, we simplify the initial task for Social Impact Assessment Methods developers and give them a greater chance of success.