Call for a Master’s Thesis on environmental impact compensation
Call for a Master’s Thesis:
Compensating environmental impacts of organisations and products – Mapping the state of research and developing new methods
Background:
A variety of approaches for assessing and reducing the environmental impacts of organisations and products are available in the scientific literature (e.g., GHG-protocol, LCA or eco-design), but studies on how to compensate these impacts are rare. In many cases it is not possible to abolish such impacts completely, at least not without a considerable delay. Reasons for this delay are for instance the need for radical changes of technologies, production processes or business models. Therefore, tailored compensation approaches can complement the “avoid, minimize and mitigate hierarchy”, to quickly offset residual environmental losses, such as in the well-known case of CO2-compensation for flights or the transportation of goods in general.
Objective:
The first objective of this Master’s Thesis project is to conduct an analysis of the current state of research on compensation mechanisms in order to identify which mechanisms can be applied how to different environmental impact categories (e.g. GHG-emissions, biodiversity loss, acidification, …). Second, depending on the result of the literature analysis, it shall be studied, how to determine the type and extent of a compensation for a product, based on the results of an impact assessment.
Methods:
Systematic literature analysis, mathematical modelling, LCA, …
Contact:
Prof. Rupert Baumgartner;
Application:
until June 7th 2019