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

Infos­heet Com­pen­sa­ti­on of Envi­ron­men­tal Impacts