Categorising tools for sustainability assessment

By B. Ness, Evelin Urbel-Piirsalu, S. Anderberg, Lennart Olsson. 2007

1,465 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim of this paper is to provide a cohesive categorisation of the most common sustainability assessment tools within the broader objective of lifting the understanding of tools from the environmentally-focused realm to that of the wider concept of sustainability. The framework provided is based on four main categories: indicators/indices, regional material and energy flows, life cycle approach and tools for integrated assessment. Furthermore, there is the overarching category of monetary valuation tools that can be used as a part of many of the tools listed in the subcategories above. The paper also shows that many of the tools for sustainability assessment still fail to fulfil the demands of the complex environmental, social and economic systems as proposed by the promoters of sustainability science. (Less)

Subfields: Building and Construction, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65e846abd20f8da5d74393925702879b14821685

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Citations in the corpus

Analysis of the potentials of multi criteria decision analysis methods to conduct sustainability assessment (2014, background): “Product energy analysis is an example of a tool covering only direct impacts, whereas LCA spans the whole life cycle stages of a product (De Ridder et al., 2007; Ness et al., 2007).”
A systemic framework for sustainability assessment (2015, background): “…the terminology is not consistent and harmonised, e.g., adopting “methods” (Thabrew et al., 2009; Patterson, 2010, Jeswani et al., 2010), “tools” (Ness et al., 2007; Finnveden and Moberg, 2005, Kissinger et al., 2011), “approaches” (Gasparatos et al., 2008; Hacking and Gunthrie, 2008),…”
Life-Cycle Assessment of the Production of Rare-Earth Elements for Energy Applications: A Review (2014, background): “ISO 14040 and 14044 developed by the International Standards Organization provide principles and guidelines for evaluating environmental impacts of products using LCA (Suh and Huppes, 2005; Finkbeiner et al., 2006; ISO, 2006; Ness et al., 2007).”
Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review (2017, methodology): “Many of these metrics emerged from environmental analysis techniques such as LCA; whereas others derived from studies in economics, engineering and social science (Chong et al., 2016; Ingwersen et al., 2014; Morrissey and Browne, 2004; Ness et al., 2007; Pires et al., 2011; Zurbrügg et al., 2014).”
Life-cycle and environmental impact assessments on processing of plant fibres and its bio-composites: A critical review (2020, background): “Usually, there are three key differences between LCA, LCC and CBA: first, LCC and LCA are product-related assessments, whereas CBA is a project- or policy-related assessment [107].”
Corporate Sustainable Development: Testing a New Scale Based on the Mainland Chinese Context (2011, background): “One of the most widely accepted CSD frameworks explains the CSD construct as represented by three correlated dimensions, namely social, economic, and environmental development; such examples are Chang and Kuo (2008), Erol et al. (2009), and Ness et al. (2007).”
Options for broadening and deepening the LCA approaches (2010, background): “both qualitative and quantitative data and by counting monetary and non-monetary aspects, MCDA allows decision-makers to include a full range of economic, environmental, social and technical criteria [10].”
THE MEANING OF AGRICULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY: EVIDENCE FROM A CONJOINT CHOICE SURVEY (2008, background): “Such methodology should take into account the purpose, the context, and the nature of all involved stakes (Johnson et al., 2003; Ness et al., 2007).”
A review of multi-criteria decision-making applications to solve energy management problems: Two decades from 1995 to 2015 (2017, background): “[114], sustainability assessment aims to evaluate global and local integrated nature– society systems from long and short term perspectives in order to help DMs recognize the actions that should or should not be taken to make society more sustainable.”