What is the ToSIA tool?

The Decision Support Tool ToSIA (Tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment) is the predominant product of EFORWOOD. It represents a dynamic sustainability impact assessment model that is analysing environmental, economic, and social impacts of changes in forestry-wood production chains, using a consistent and harmonised framework from the forest to the end-of-life of final products.

Figue1. The basic flow of the use of the ToSIA application, Figure 2. Results graphical visualizations on WebToSIA .

ToSIA will be applied on different regional data sets, which have been collected within the EFORWOOD project – e.g. Baden-Württemberg Case Study with emphasis on an increasing demand for forest bio-energy in future, or the Scandinavian Case Study where different technology scenarios are assessed. The results do not only give a holistic picture on the current status of the region’s forest value chains in terms of e.g. employment figures, production costs or CO2 emissions, but also make it possible to evaluate the impacts on sustainability of potential developments in future as a consequence of increasing demand for forest bio-energy.

Some specific examples in which ToSIA could be used are: projection of the banning impacts,  restricting the size of clear cuttings or seeting limits for the amount of toxic waste released by the industry. The user may also wish to used this tool to study the impacts of the extranl trends such as a change in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The difference between ToSIA and other similar, already existing, tools is that none of those addresses all three sustainability dimensions (environmental, economical and social) along the whole FWC in a balanced way.