Exploring the Integration of SROI and Life Cycle Thinking

In July 2026, Cozeta Energy participated in the Life Cycle Innovation Conference (LCIC 2026) in Berlin, Germany, where the team presented the research poster “Life Cycle Thinking Operationalized with SROI: A WASH Case Study in Asia.” The presentation shared the team’s research on integrating Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) with Social Return on Investment (SROI).

LCIC focuses on life cycle approaches and sustainability innovation, bringing together researchers and practitioners from around the world to exchange ideas on emerging applications of life cycle methods across environmental, social, and sustainability decision-making. Our research extended this discussion to a practical question: when a sustainability intervention generates health and social outcomes at the same time, how can these impacts be identified and quantified?

Extending Life Cycle Thinking to Social Impacts

Cozeta Energy has long been engaged in carbon management and life cycle-related work, including ISO 14067 product carbon footprinting. Building on this experience with life cycle approaches, the research further explores outcomes beyond environmental impacts.

Life Cycle Thinking focuses on understanding the impacts of a product, service, or intervention across different life cycle stages. In practice, however, health, quality of life, and other social outcomes can be difficult to incorporate into the same analytical framework as environmental indicators. The team therefore explored integrating SROI into Life Cycle Thinking, using the SROI outcome chain and valuation approach to complement life cycle analysis with a clearer view of social and health outcomes.

How Can SROI Be Integrated with Life Cycle Thinking?

The research framework first uses Life Cycle Thinking to define the system boundary and intervention stages, then maps inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes. Health and social outcomes with clear causal links and sufficient data are subsequently valued. Financial proxies used in SROI can translate outcomes that are otherwise difficult to compare directly into monetary values, which can then be adjusted and aggregated into indicators that support decision-making.

Together, the two approaches help answer different questions: Life Cycle Thinking helps identify “where in the life cycle does the impact occur?”, while SROI helps further explore “what value do these outcomes represent?” This integration is not intended to replace life cycle methods with SROI, but rather to add a social value quantification layer to the existing life cycle framework.

To examine the practical application of the approach, the research used a WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) case in Asia as the study context, analyzing health and social outcomes arising during the use phase of infrastructure and behavioral interventions. The case analysis combined project data, literature, and financial proxies, while also considering data limitations and uncertainties in the estimation process. Through the case study, the research examined how an impact assessment framework with clear logic and traceability could be developed when complete data are not available.

This also highlights another potential benefit of integrating SROI with Life Cycle Thinking: in addition to identifying the impacts generated by sustainability interventions, the approach can translate selected health and social outcomes into comparable value information, providing another perspective for evaluating sustainability initiatives.

International Exchange at LCIC 2026

The research was presented as a poster at LCIC 2026, providing an opportunity to exchange ideas with researchers and practitioners working in life cycle assessment, sustainability innovation, and related fields.

For Cozeta Energy, the conference also provided an opportunity to extend its existing experience in ISO 14067, carbon footprinting, and life cycle-related work into the area of social value and impact assessment.

As sustainability issues facing businesses become increasingly complex, a single environmental indicator may not fully capture the impacts of an intervention. By combining Life Cycle Thinking with different assessment approaches, Cozeta Energy will continue to explore ways to develop a more systematic understanding of sustainability impacts and apply these insights to decision-making.

海報發表細節

研究題目： Operationalizing Life Cycle Thinking through Social Return on Investment (SROI): A WASH Case Study in Asia

發表形式： Poster Presentation｜Poster No. 24

發表人： YouXuan Xiao

共同作者： Hsu-Yao Huang、Lung-Chieh Lin

發表場次： Session 17 – Innovative Ways to Assess Sustainability with Life Cycle Approaches / Poster Session 03

會議： 5th Life Cycle Innovation Conference (LCIC 2026)

地點： GLS Campus Berlin, Berlin, Germany

日期： 2026 年 7 月 1–3 日