Assessing health, environmental and life cycle impacts
Overall Course Objectives
• Gained core competences: Develop your own impact pathway from source to damage on human health, ecosystem quality and natural resources
• Gained knowledge: Methods and data to assess and evaluate health and environmental impacts in a life cycle perspective from local to global scale, thorough understanding of assessment principles, mathematical modeling steps, working with available models and data
• Gained skills: Identify, apply and interpret results of assessment methods and tools for quantifying environmental, health and life cycle impacts associated with emissions and resources consumption, incl. limitations, assumptions and uncertainty
• Presumed knowledge: Fundamentals in mathematical modeling and environmental chemistry; knowledge in life cycle (impact) assessment and/or risk assessment and/or policy analysis is helpful
• Required expertise in follow-up education (as engineers): Identify and apply approaches for evaluating chemical pollution problems in different contexts
Learning Objectives
- Describe and analyze complex real-life impact assessment and chemical substitution problems
- Explain principles and modeling approaches of different impact assessment methods
- Apply impact assessment methods to questions from life cycle assessment, alternatives assessment, product design and sustainability assessment
- Apply models to quantify environmental and health impacts, e.g. of chemical emissions and chemicals in products
- Characterize impacts based on existing data and assessment models
- Evaluate strengths and limitations of quantitative impact assessment methods and determine and justify uncertainties
- Identify and answer research questions from different environmental management fields
- Design and develop impact pathways that are aligned with current impact quantification methods
- Communicate model results consistently and structured in oral and written form
Course Content
The course consists of 3 main sections: (i) overview, understanding and modeling steps of different impact assessment methods; (ii) principles, analysis and development of impact pathways and quantification of environmental fate, exposure and effects; (e) rank and recommend best-in-class solutions based on quantified impacts and communicating results in a consistent, reliable and transparent way to decision makers and stakeholders
Recommended prerequisites
– BSc in Environmental, Chemical, Civil Eng., or equivalent (not mandatory)
– Expertise in life cycle assessment or risk assessment (not mandatory)
Teaching Method
– Lectures & hands-on exercises, group work, and real-life case study
– Including company visits (e.g. Novo Nordisk, Reel Energy)