Which role plays the "Social aspects" tab for impact analysis and results and how are they calculated?

Question

Dear openLCA community,

when i calculate the results for a product system also containing social indicators, i recognized that entering the data in "Social aspects" tab seems not be effecting or been calculated in the results.

Do i have to create a manual flow for each social indicator value in the process? If yes, which role then plays the social aspects tab?

When there are social indicator flows in a process of a product system, how are the inventory results actually calculated?

Sry, i couldn't find this in the soca or openLCA manual and i would appreciate a helpful comment a lot!

Thanks and best

Walther

Answer 1

Hi Walther,

these social aspects serve to store social indicator values, for all social indicators, including qualitative ones, with data quality and documentation and risk assessment. They are not meant to be added "afterwards". In the normal calculation, they are not considered, but instead the risk assessed elementary flows are considered (on the IO sheet).

With a script, you can use the social indicators directly to calculate, see e.g. here https://www.greendelta.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2019_LCA_XIX_Revisiting-the-activity-variable-in-SLCA.pdf

Best wishes,

Andreas

Comments

Thanks Andreas!

In the meanwhile i also figured out that it is like you said. Since i am not only creating own processes but also a new LCIA method, i moved entirely to editing data via XML in ILCD files and importing/exporting them.

Kind regards