Inclusive environmental impact assessment indices with consideration of public acceptance: Application to power generation technologies in Japan

• We propose indices to evaluate economic, environmental and social costs of artefacts.
• These indices assessed the sustainability of eight power generation technologies.
• Conjoint analysis quantified public expectation and concern about these technologies.

Public acceptance is one of the most important issues when considering the sustainability of anthropogenic systems. The development of energy systems in the future will depend on the balance of environmental impact, economic feasibility, and public acceptance. On the basis of existing inclusive environmental impact indices, such as the Inclusive Impact Index (Triple I) and emergy, in the present work we propose two novel indices, Triple Isocial and Triple Iemergy-social, that can be used to evaluate public acceptance together with economic and environmental aspects simultaneously. This is the claim of originality of this work. In this study, we applied these indices to eight power generation technologies and, to quantify public expectations and concern, we conducted a questionnaire survey about these technologies. The conjoint analysis reveals the marginal rate of allowance to compensate (MRAC), a term we propose as a replacement of the marginal willingness to pay, in units of monetary value, ecological footprint, or emergy for six attributes considered to affect public acceptance. Triple Isocial and Triple Iemergy-social of the power generation technologies are calculated using MRAC, and it suggests that only the geological thermal energy is sustainable while the others need to be improved in terms of monetary, environmental, and/or social costs to reach a level at which these technologies are regarded as sustainable.

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