Aiming for sustainable development implies reflecting on all areas linked with human activities and in all types of organisations. This brings a need to assess both the socio-economic-environmental impacts associated with energy interventions and with research activities.
Full sustainability life cycle assessment (LCA) of an energy system must encompass more than just emissions, honouring constraints on peak consumption and demand, source capacity, system costs and resilience, renewables penetration targets and construction limits, while also meeting urgent sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) driven by the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Similarly, calculating the environmental footprint of academic research projects vis-à-vis the scientific contribution they aim to make toward societal development is an important measure to help host organisations, funders and government demonstrate that researchers are giving careful considerations to unintended project impacts. Even net zero research projects involve scientific and administrative activities that are associated with potential environmental footprints, e.g., business trips, laboratory-based experiments, attendance to conferences and running computationally expensive simulations.
Current LCA methodologies based on ISO standards retain practical challenges with drawing system boundaries and deciding on which processes/inventories should be included or excluded in the analysis. Their subjective selection may lead to unrepresentative results, depending on the chosen carbon accounting and reporting system. Also, environmental LCA needs to be complemented by Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and by Social and socio-economic LCA (S-LCA) for the full sustainability assessment of the value chain of goods and services.
In this PhD project, bespoke models will be developed for the holistic integration of LCA, LCC and S-LCA to analyse planned and potential sustainable low-carbon energy interventions in the city of Glasgow, as well as the activities of the GALLANT research programme. Sensitivity of the results on system boundaries and processes, and on sustainability KPIs will be investigated. The anticipated outcome is a novel, integrated framework to inform decision-making to reduce future impacts. With the support of the Centre for Sustainable Solutions, the framework will be rolled out across the GALLANT project partners (for energy systems) and UofG (for research projects).
The successful candidate will demonstrate appropriate modelling and coding skills and experience to assess, project and inform decisions based on LCA best practices.
We champion Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, believing that this is the way to increase research productivity and quality and to enhance societal and economic impact. Likewise, the University of Glasgow and our external partners are fully committed to EDI principles.
We support applications from under-represented backgrounds, childcare support for conference attendance, flexible working for carers and promote a work-life balance.
For enquires related to EDI, please address to GALLANT EDI Champion, Dr Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay via the GALLANT-phd mailbox.
The topic and funding for this PhD are confirmed.
How to Apply: Please refer to the following website for details on how to apply: https://www.gla.ac.uk/gallant. For studentship enquiries, please contact [Email Address Removed].
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