What is “Sociogeochemistry” for LCA?

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment is a tool that gives us information for decision-making to decrease impacts of human activities on the global environment. Meanwhile “Sociogeochemistry” is a tool that gives us the coherent thinking to make out roots of the problems from above information and to make decisions on the issue actually. Both of them are able to complement one another to have a deep understanding of environmental problems and to take countermeasures of the issues. When Takahisa Hanya evolved “Sociogeochemistry,” he introduced his own “system theory” as the coherent methodology that is applied to both natural science and social science to solve various problems. Hanya found the directional behavior of systems from studies in “Sociogeochemistry” that was based on “system theory” and he advocated “Shanie hypothesis” as the underlying cause of it. Hanya made a working hypothesis where he defined “Shanie hypothesis” as an axiom. And he tried to explain and interpret the various issues like environmental problems in the hypothesis. Hanya has evolved this approach into a kind of value theory based on system theory. And he considered that his new value theory can become a cornerstone to design human society in the future.