Compare methods

	Social Life Cycle Assessment	Ecological Footprint Analysis
Field	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2009	1996
Originator	UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative (Catherine Benoit & Bernard Mazijn, eds.)	Mathis Wackernagel & William E. Rees
Type	Life-cycle pipeline for assessing social impacts of products	Bioproductive-area accounting pipeline for human demand versus biocapacity
Seminal source	Benoit, C., & Mazijn, B. (Eds.). (2009). Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products. UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative, United Nations Environment Programme. ISBN: 9789280730210	Wackernagel, M., & Rees, W. E. (1996). Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society Publishers. ISBN: 9780865713123
Aliases	S-LCA, Social LCA, Societal Life Cycle Assessment, Product Social Impact Assessment	Ecological Footprint Accounting, Footprint-Biocapacity Accounting, Wackernagel-Rees Footprint, EF Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) evaluates the social and socio-economic impacts of products and services across their entire life cycle, from raw-material extraction through manufacturing, use, and disposal. It mirrors the four-phase structure of environmental LCA, goal and scope definition, inventory, impact assessment, and interpretation, but replaces physical pressures with effects on people, organized by stakeholder categories such as workers, local communities, society, consumers, and value-chain actors. The approach was codified in the 2009 UNEP/SETAC Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products, edited by Catherine Benoit and Bernard Mazijn, which established stakeholder categories, impact subcategories, and the use of performance reference points to judge whether a measured condition is good or bad. Benoit and colleagues' 2010 article situated the guidelines within the broader life-cycle sustainability assessment agenda and explained their just-in-time arrival as supply-chain social concerns rose. Because many social indicators are qualitative and depend on conduct rather than throughput, S-LCA leans on activity variables such as worker-hours to connect indicators to the functional unit. It complements environmental LCA and life-cycle costing to round out a three-pillar sustainability assessment.	Ecological footprint analysis measures human demand on nature by translating the resources a population consumes and the wastes it generates into the area of biologically productive land and sea required to supply them. Introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in their 1996 book Our Ecological Footprint, the method expresses both demand (the footprint) and supply (biocapacity) in a common unit, the global hectare, so that the two can be compared directly. When a population's footprint exceeds the biocapacity available to it, the difference is an ecological deficit, and at the planetary scale a persistent deficit signals overshoot of the biosphere's regenerative capacity. The 2002 analysis by Wackernagel and colleagues operationalized this accounting at the global level, estimating that humanity moved from using about 70 percent of the biosphere's capacity in 1961 to roughly 120 percent by the late 1990s. The carbon component, the area of forest needed to sequester fossil-fuel emissions, is typically the largest and fastest-growing share. Footprint analysis is thus a sustainability accounting tool that renders an abstract idea, living within ecological limits, into a single comparable balance sheet.