Methodological Challenges of Prospective Assessments

Traditionally, environmental, economic, and social impact assessments of technological innovations have been conducted retrospectively, which means assessing the present or past impacts of products and services. However, for the evaluation of future aspects of technological developments, alternative assessment methods are needed. Prospective assessment is a future-oriented method that can be used to assess environmental, economic, and social impacts. Prospective assessments, like retrospective assessments, provide guidance to decision-makers, including technology developers, policymakers, and manufacturers. Despite the benefits offered by such assessments, a standard method to follow when conducting a prospective assessment presently does not exist.
This section focuses on the methodological challenges of prospective assessments for the evaluation of the impacts of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on emerging battery technologies. Four key challenges of prospective assessments are defined and discussed, being data availability and quality, scaling issues, uncertainty management and variability, and comparability. Each of these challenges is described, and existing methods are suggested to mitigate the challenges. The section concludes by emphasising the need for harmonised and standardised methods when communicating results related to prospective LCAs. In addition, studies need to address the key challenges identified to improve the wider acceptance of results amongst stakeholders and decision-makers.