New paper in "Circular Economy and Sustainability" titled “Measuring the Economic Impacts of a Circular Economy: an Evaluation of Indicators”
In this new paper Anna Kulakovskaya, Christof Knoeri, Franz Radke, and Nicola Blum evaluated the performance of meso (value-chain level) economic circular economy indicators.
A circular economy (CE) is often seen as a promising way to address pressing environmental challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion. However, the CE concept remains contested, and the implementation of circular strategies, such as reduce, reuse, or recycle, not always lead to more sustainability. To understand whether the implementation of CSs is actually sustainable, CE indicators are needed.
Based on pre-defined evaluation criteria, the authors assessed how capable the existing meso (value-chain level) economic CE indicators (eCEis) are of measuring the economic impacts of implementing circular strategies. The results show that the existing meso eCEis have limited capabilities for measuring the impacts. They largely satisfy the evaluation criteria ‘diagnostic’ and ‘useful’, moderately satisfy the criterion ‘practical’, and barely satisfy the criteria ‘systemic’ and ‘transparent’.
The authors recommend that future studies on eCEis place a stronger focus on adopting a systemic perspective, discuss their limitations and uncertainties in more detail, and consider combining meso eCEis with the indicators of other dimensions (environmental, social) and levels (micro, macro).
This research was supported by National Research Programme (NRP73) under the ‘Towards A sustainable CircuLar Economy – Combining a material flow with a business and policy perspective’ (TACLE) project.