Workshop 11: How to Communicate Sustainability? Translating LCA Results into Meaningful Messages and Engaging Non-expert Audience with Interactive Quizzes

Main Presenter: Pauline Ruiz, Silvia Forin

Co-Authors:

Workshop Format: Short input by selected speakers; Roundtable

Life Cycle Assessment is widely recognised as a robust, science-based method to assess environmental sustainability. However, translating complex LCA results into clear, credible, and decision-relevant communication remains challenging. While LCA practitioners are comfortable with detailed system analyses and nuanced results, often expressed in technical units such as CO2e or CTUs, policymakers, businesses, and markets often require simplified messages to support decisions and avoid misinterpretation or greenwashing.

This interactive workshop addresses the question: how can sustainability results be communicated responsibly without losing scientific integrity? The workshop will start with a short introductory presentation using Renewable Carbon Initiative (RCI) case studies as practical examples of sustainability communication. These case studies are based on peer-reviewed LCAs and deliberately reduce scope, complexity, and length to improve readability while remaining grounded in LCA methodologies.

Following the introduction, the workshop will be structured as a moderated round-table discussion. Participants will be invited to share experiences, expectations, and challenges related to communicating LCA results in research, industry, and policy contexts, if possible mentioning concrete examples to make the dilemma as intelligible as possible, also for other participants. The discussion will focus on key questions such as the acceptable level of simplification, maintaining transparency when prioritising or omitting information, and the boundary between effective communication and greenwashing.

In the second part of the workshop, participants will be presented with quizzes as a tool to communicate the crucial results and methodological implications of LCA studies. The participants will take part in an exemplary quiz that has already been run with different stakeholders. The aim is to demonstrate the use of quizzes as an audience activation and engagement method and to encourage our peers to further develop this practice.

After the exemplary quiz, participants can propose topics concerning methodologies or result communication, e.g. those highlighted during the round-table discussion, and work on related quiz questions in small groups (ideally 4 persons on-site). In the end, the groups will present their quiz questions to the other participants, who will act as a test audience and provide feedback.
After the workshop, participants will have widened their horizon on LCA communication challenges and will be able to apply new methods for engaging non-expert audiences in LCA and LCM-related discussions.

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