Researcher's Information
Associate Professor
SHIGETOMI, Yosuke
Environmental Systems Engineering
Exploring sustainable and equitable consumption and production through life-cycle thinking
Achieving a carbon neutral goal is essential for the future of humanity. At the same time, many other environmental side effects of addressing climate change issues should be considered. For example, advanced energy technologies require more critical resources than conventional ones, which can cause not only other environmental damage, but also local impacts on human health. They also require sufficient human resources at a time when many developed countries are facing aging and shrinking populations. To address these kinds of trade-offs between the environment and society, life-cycle thinking is effective as an environmentally holistic approach.
This laboratory focuses on the environmental and social impacts of economy-wide lifestyle changes and demographic trends, mainly through environmental input-output analysis (IOA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). Through supply chain impact quantification studies, we aim to clarify how sustainable and equitable consumption and production can be achieved cognizant of carbon neutrality and human well-being.
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Schematic figure of lifestyle-based CO2 emissions through the supply chain
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The cover art of an international journal that illustrates our previous study quantifying lifestyle impacts upon carbon emissions from both the embodied CO2 and materially retained carbon