ASSESSMENT OF THE SUITABILITY OF MCDA METHODS FOR AGGREGATION IN SOCIAL LCA: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

Abstract

Considering that sustainability has encouraged organizations and governments to develop tools capable of supporting the decision-making process to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), through research, has shown great capacity and promising potential. However, this tool, due to its subjective nature, lacks methodologies capable of tackling aggregation and weighting steps across multiple criteria. This research addresses one of the methodological gaps listed by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which is the consideration of S-LCA in decision-making. Based on this context, the objective of this systematic literature review is to identify, characterize, and analyze research that has applied Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) as a methodology to support decision-making in S-LCA studies. In this review, 284 articles were identified, of which 30 were considered relevant, mostly published in recent years, with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method being the most used. In conclusion, the growing research on S-LCA still requires methodological improvement, as researchers often choose methods randomly, without adequate justification or criteria.