The number of pet animals in the European Union is increasing over the last decades. Few studies with a limited focus in terms of impacts and life cycle stages exist that assess the environmental impacts of dogs. This paper addresses the entire life cycle of a dog. An LCA study on an average dog was conducted considering the pet food and dog excrements, i.e., urine and feces. Fifteen impact categories were analyzed. An average dog has a climate change and freshwater eutrophication potential of around 8200 kg CO₂eq and 5.0 kg Peq., respectively. The main contribution to most impact categories over the dog’s life is caused by pet food. Freshwater eutrophication is mainly determined by the dog´s urine and feces. Feces also have a significant contribution to the category of freshwater ecotoxicity. Impacts increase significantly with increasing weight and a longer lifetime of the dog as well as low collection rates of the feces. This LCA study reveals that pet dogs can have a significant environmental impact, e.g., around 7% of the annual climate change impact of an average EU citizen. Optimizing pet food and increasing the feces´ collection rate can reduce the impacts.

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the energy transition may lead to trade-offs with other impacts on the environment, society, and economy. One challenge is resource use impacts due to increasing demand for high-tech metals and minerals. A review of the current state of the art resource assessment of energy systems was conducted to identify gaps in research and application. Publications covering complete energy systems and supplying a detailed resource assessment were the focus of the evaluation. Overall, 92 publications were identified and categorized by the type of system covered and the applied abiotic resource assessment methods. A total of 78 out of 92 publications covered sub-systems of renewable energy systems, and nine considered complete energy systems and conducted a detailed resource use assessment. Most of the publications in the group “complete energy system and detailed resource assessment” were found in grey literature. Several different aspects were covered to assess resource use. Thirty publications focused on similar aspects including criticality and supply risks, but technology-specific aspects are rarely assessed in the resource assessment of renewable energy systems. Few publications included sector coupling technologies, and among the publications most relevant to the aim of this paper one third did not conduct an indicator-driven assessment.

In times of increasing awareness of limited resources, companies are becoming especially interested in criticality assessments. Based on the existing approaches of ESSENZ (integrated method to assess resource efficiency) and SCARCE (approach is to enhance the assessment of critical resource use at the country level), a method called CS-ESSENZ (company-specific ESSENZ) has been developed to measure the company-specific aspects of criticality and social impact in supply chains for abiotic resources. These comprise 20 categories and corresponding indicators, based on 19 ESSENZ and 25 SCARCE categories. Eleven of these indicators were modified, four were newly developed (e.g., economic importance), and the last five were applied as they are in ESSENZ or SCARCE. CS-ESSENZ was tested using the case study of a smartphone, demonstrating the method’s applicability as well as generating additional information on company-specific improvement potential. The results for supply risk showed that 29 out of 58 ESSENZ hotspots showed high, and 12 showed medium, improvement potential from the company perspective. CS-ESSENZ enables companies to obtain specific information on criticality and social aspects in their supply chains and points out areas for improvement, e.g., with respect to purchasing strategies for cobalt.

While criticality assessment frameworks aim to support strategic decision-making, their predominantly static nature limits their ability to reflect the temporal dynamics of resource availability. This paper presents a conceptual framework for integrating temporal aspects into the criticality assessment method ESSENZ following a four-step approach. First, the ESSENZ methodology is analyzed to identify temporal dependencies. Second, the economic categories are qualitatively classified into temporal archetypes. Third, categories with available time-series (1998-2023) are quantitatively assessed. Finally, the findings are synthesized into a conceptual framework. The categories exhibit heterogeneous temporal dynamics. Governance and production concentration, for example, show high lag-1 autocorrelation (0.70–0.78) and slow structural change, indicating an inertial archetype. In contrast, the Policy Perception Index shows more volatility (autocorrelation 0.27), suggesting that it is less suitable for deterministic forecasting. Based on these findings, we propose a conceptual Prospective ESSENZ framework. It distinguishes category-material-combinations into three types: (1) near static; (2) inertial; and (3) volatile categories. By restricting scenario dependence to the most volatile categories, this approach reduces data requirements while minting sensitivity to those categories where future developments are least predictable. This provides a methodological basis for integrating temporal dynamics into ESSENZ and supporting prospective criticality assessments.