Mining activities disproportionally impact local and indigenous communities, but these social impacts are usually left out of conventional life cycle assessment. Working with UQ SMI, I will identify relevant social indicators and develop a method to quantify them, conducting a holistic assessment for decarbonization technologies.
Alliana Snead is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who grew up on the east coast of the United States, living and learning in close connection with coastal environments. Her Fulbright project is inspired by this deep connection to place and by an interest in how communities experience and value their surrounding land and water.
As a Fulbright Scholar, Alliana seeks to learn directly from communities whose social and cultural connections to land may be overlooked by assessments that claim environmental sustainability without fully accounting for social impacts. Her research aims to better understand and prioritise the impacts experienced by these communities, in order to inform and refine social life cycle assessment methodologies, with a particular focus on applications in the mining context.