PRINCE hotspots method presented at industrial ecology conference

Overview

On 25 June 2017, PRINCE team member Bertram de Boer of CML presented a new process for identifying potential room for improvement in the footprints of specific consumption sectors in an economy at the 9th biennial conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE)/25th Annual Conference of the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems Technology (ISSST) in Chicago, USA.

The process, developed as part of PRINCE, involves identifying “hotspot” sectors – those with particularly large or intense footprints – and looking at the footprints of the same sectors in a spread of different national economies. Where another country has achieved a smaller footprint for the sector, a simple comparison can indicate how much potential there is for improvement in the hotspot sector – and, by extension, where lessons might be learned to realize those improvements. An academic paper on this work is currently in review.