Dear partners of the Life Cycle Initiative and the entire Life Cycle Community,

We hope that you and your families are safe and healthy, during these unprecedented times.

The global coronavirus pandemic has forced us to rapidly adapt the way of doing business. Despite the challenging circumstances, we are doing our best to ensure the continuity of our operations. Most of our activities are operating normally, though in a virtual way. This includes, among others, the following events that were going to be organized in Dublin during the SETAC conference:

• The Stakeholder Consultation on the Creation of a Global Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method will take place on Thursday May 7, 14:00 CEST in a virtual platform. Please register here if you would like to participate, and you will be contacted on the Monday before the event (May 4) with the link to connect.
• The Steering Committee meeting of the Life Cycle Initiative will still take place on Tuesday May 5, but virtually.
• The GLAD launch event and the MariLCA workshop will be moved to June; please stay tuned for the new dates of these 2 events in our next newsletter, coming out in early May.

The COVID-19 crisis is already demonstrating significant impacts on trade, mobility and global supply chains. Even in this context, life cycle thinking and life cycle assessment remain essential to support decision-making to move towards a more resilient society and to ensure the uptake of sustainable consumption and production patterns. This may require a temporal re-shuffling of resources and priorities as we strive to inform necessary processes to respond to the crisis.

While we hope for this crisis to end as soon as possible, we wish to use this time as an opportunity to reflect on what is needed to achieve a real change, to build a more sustainable society. In this sense we are working tirelessly to embed Life Cycle Thinking in the UN System’s response to the crisis, e.g., in the ways to inform the management of increased medical and health-related waste, the consideration of environmental aspects in the emergency response, and in supporting member states with LCA to consider the impacts on climate change, biodiversity and pollution when designing stimulus packages. These can all be used in a transformational way for a sustainable new economy in alignment with the Post 2030 agenda, the SDGs and the Paris Agreement, all of which continue to be the global roadmap for the future.

We look forward to continuing to work closely together with you, the Life Cycle Community, and we thank you for your excellent partnership!

With kind regards,

Secretariat of The Life Cycle Initiative