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What we're all about
Science to Solutions
Sustainability isn't just about risk and reputation, anymore. Calculating GHG emissions, assessing water stress, or quantifying impacts on communities and stakeholders across your value chain requires the best science applied to your specific challenges and opportunities.
The TASA team brings decades of experience doing just that, from authoring hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers to delivering practical insights to the most influential organizations across business, advocacy and public policy.
Trusted Data & Transparent Methods
For sustainability to be a strategic asset, performance can't be based on off-the-shelf, stale, industry-averaged data applied to last year's reported activities. Meeting your sustainability goals requires deep insights into where, when and how your specific operations impact current and future performance.
The TASA team are scholars, first, developing state-of-the-art data and methods -- leveraging this knowledge toward evidence-based theories of change and transformative business models for sustainable progress.
how we help our clients advance sustainability
GHG Accounting & Scope 3 Emissions Interventions
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it -- cliché, but true. Our approaches to measuring sustainability impacts across production-consumption systems are increasingly focusing on real-time and prospective models targeting operational decision contexts (e.g. procurement, production scheduling and end-of-life management, to name a few). To do this, we lean on analytical and modeling techniques that leverage the full arsenal of environmental, engineering and economic data and place these in the hands of decision-makers in usable ways.
This type of deep operational assessment can't be accomplished with off-the-shelf data or calculators. Our most current approach to supply chain GHG accounting is a path exchange scenario analysis (PESA). Working with a Global 50 client, we have co-developed a structural path analysis application of a regionally-specific hybrid-LCA to improve estimates of upstream scope 3 emissions and quantify potential reduction scenarios toward meeting their 2030 targets. Early work toward this approach can be found in Pelton et al. 2016; contact us, we'd be happy to walk you through a demo.
Commodity Flow Analysis & Supply Chain Sustainability
Where products are produced matters - sustainability performance often varies significantly from one location to the next. Sometimes we know where the things we buy are produced, but many times we don't. Even the most sophisticated companies often don't know from where upstream components or ingredients are sourced within their supply chains. Working with multiple large NGOs and Fortune 250 companies, we developed a novel commodity flow analysis that estimates O-D relationships at the US county-level.
This approach has been used to assess carbon emissions, water stress and PM2.5 health impacts of corporate supply chains, reaching up multiple tiers of supply. Delivering this degree of visibility provide opportunities for numerous eco-efficient operational interventions. See Brauman et al. 2020 and Smith et al. 2017 for additional details on the methods and their application.
Circular Economy
Increasingly, sustainability is being overtaken by the concept of the Circular Economy. While not entirely new and not always well defined, Circular Economy has recently gained importance within the agendas of policymakers and corporate mangers, alike. At its core, the idea of a circular economy is restorative, or in the best case, regenerative – closing the loop on material and energy flows across economic systems and striving to keep products and their components circulating at their highest value. In short, to achieve circularity, remanufactured, reused and recycled materials need to expand beyond the niche roles they play in the broader economy.
Our work in this area has largely addressed policy drivers and their impacts on environmental performance associated with circularity. Our contributions in this area include a better understanding of virgin material displacement and hotspot drivers toward emissions reductions of high emitting materials, like Steel. For additional details, see Wang et al. 2021 and Peng et al. 2019. Please contact us, if you are struggling to measure the impacts of your circularity programs.
Voluntary Sustainability Governance & Capacity Building
In most voluntary sustainability governance initiatives, different societal sectors—private companies, non‐profit organizations, researchers, and governmental agencies—devise and enforce rules for those voluntarily consenting to abide by them. In a number of cases—governance of coffee, sugar, fisheries, electronics, or industrial cleaning products—these voluntary initiatives have emerged, competing and consolidating over time, and often converging toward a common sustainability standard. Through this dynamic process, accepted norms and practices emerge, evolve, and become codified. That said, measuring the impacts on emissions, water stresses, land-use change or poverty have been illusive.
Our work on this topic, with leading global certification organizations and Global 500 companies, is developing linkages across criteria and sustainable development indicators through spatially-explicit geodesign tools assessing the efficacy of voluntary standards. For more information, see Jordan et al. 2017, Smith et al. 2019, Smith & Fischlein 2010. Let us know if we can help you navigate your engagement with voluntary sustainability governance networks.