Perspective Open Access

Carbon Neutrality and Life Cycle Thinking

Clean Energy and Sustainability. 2023, 1(1), 10002; https://doi.org/10.35534/ces.2023.10002
Ruoxi Xiong    Ming Xu *   
1
School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 08 Dec 2022    Accepted: 21 Jan 2023    Published: 29 Jan 2023   

Abstract

Climate change is one of the most critical sustainability challenges facing the humanity. International communities have joined forces to mitigate climate change impact and aim to achieve carbon neutrality in the coming decades. To achieve this ambitious goal, life cycle thinking can play critical roles. Specifically, life cycle thinking helps evaluate the true climate impacts to avoid shifting emissions across processes in a product life cycle. It can also help inform consumers with carbon footprint information to make climate-conscious choices. Finally, it can help identify key processes dominating the carbon footprint of a product so that future improvement can set priorities. High quality data is required for accurate and timely carbon footprint accounting and critical challenges exist to obtain and share such data.

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© 2024 by the authors; licensee SCIEPublish, SCISCAN co. Ltd. This article is an open access article distributed under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).