Suh was born to Kyongja An and Jaeyong Suh in Seoul, South Korea, where he spent his childhood. Suh served the South Korean military (army) and was discharged as a sergeant. Suh completed his Bachelor of Science and Master's degree in environmental engineering from Ajou University in South Korea. Following this, he moved to the Netherlands and enrolled at Leiden University for his PhD.^[1]

During his PhD research, Suh contributed to two books, The Computational Structure of Life Cycle Assessment^[2] and Handbook on life cycle assessment: operational guide to the ISO standards.^[3]

Upon completing his PhD (cum laude), Suh taught in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University for one year before joining the University of Minnesota College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences as an assistant professor.^[4] While there, Suh used a life-cycle assessment approach to quantify the environmental effect of products and services. He analyzed 44 greenhouse gas emissions among about 500 product and service groups throughout the United States economy and determined that service sectors produced less than 5% of the nation's overall greenhouse gas emissions directly, while 37.6% of the nation's total greenhouse gas emissions were generated directly and indirectly to support service sectors throughout the supply chain.^[5] Suh contributed to the development of methods and data for quantifying climate change and other environmental and natural resource impacts of producing, using, and disposing of goods and services. In particular, Suh and his colleagues contributed to the development and applications of input-output LCA (EIO-LCA) and its combination with process analysis, called hybrid approach.^[6] In 2009 Suh published an edited volume, Handbook of Input-Output Economics in Industrial Ecology.^[7]

In 2009, Suh's research team was the first to compare water use in corn-ethanol production on a state-by-state basis.^[8] As a result, he was awarded the McKnight Land-Grand Professorship in 2009 and 2010 by the University of Minnesota,^[9] and received the International Society for Industrial Ecology's Robert A. Laudise Prize.^[10] Due to his research, Suh was appointed as one of the 28 members of the International Resources Panel of the United Nations Environment Programme.^[4]

Suh contributed to the development of international standards on Life Cycle Assessment and carbon accounting. In 2009, Suh was appointed as a member of the working group organized by the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development that was in charge of drafting the Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards.^[11] Suh served the Technical Committee 207 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in its effort to produce ISO standards on greenhouse gas emissions reporting, communication, and management (ISO 14064 and ISO 14068) as a Technical Liaison by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

Suh left the University of Minnesota to join the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management^[12] as an associate professor in 2010.^[4] As a faculty member, Suh and members of various faculties established the Sustainable Chemical Network to track the health and environmental impacts of new substances. In this collaboration, they created an online tool called the Chemical Life-Cycle Collaborative (CLiCC),^[13] to quantify the environmental and health implications of new synthetic chemicals and materials over their life cycles.^[14] Suh received the Leontief Memorial Prize by the International Input-Output Association (IIOA) in 2011 with a paper entitled "The Structure of Life-Cycle Environmental Impact of the U.S. Economy".^[15] He also received the Sir Richard Stone Award from the same organization in that year.^[15] In 2017, Suh was named the lead principal investigator of the Reducing Embodied-energy and Decreasing Emissions (R.E.M.A.D.E.) project to improve energy efficiency.^[16]

In 2013, Suh was appointed as a Coordinating Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under which he co-authored the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and corresponding Summary for Policy Makers.^[17]

In 2019, Suh was appointed as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Frontiers in Sustainability, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Frontiers Media.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Suh was selected as the recipient of the 2020 Rita Schenck Lifetime Individual Leadership in LCA Award.^[18] He was also recognized on Clarivate Analytics's Highly Cited Researchers as a scientist who ranked in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year.^[19] The following year, Suh was elected a member of the Royal Society of Arts for his global leadership in sustainability solutions.^[20]

In 2005, Suh founded VitalMetrics Inc, a Data-as-a-Service company for carbon accounting and life-cycle assessment.^[21] Suh serves Carbon Minds, a German software and data firm specialized in sustainability measurement of chemical industry, as a Scientific Advisor.^[22]

In 2018, Suh founded a not-for-profit initiative, Adopt a Cookstove Today (ACT) aiming to disseminate high efficiency cookstoves and replace inefficient three stone fire and charcoal stoves in rural Africa.^[23] Through this initiative, Suh and his team support underprivileged rural communities in Africa to improve the welfare of women and children and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and indoor air pollution.^[24]

Since 2019, Suh is serving a local philanthropic organization, World Dance for Humanity, as a board member. The organization supports 28 underprivileged communities in rural Rwanda.^[25]

Sangwon Suh publications indexed by Google Scholar