A systemic framework for sustainability assessment

By Serenella Sala, B. Ciuffo, Peter Nijkamp. 2015

650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sustainability assessment (SA) is a complex appraisal method. It is conducted for supporting decision-making and policy in a broad environmental, economic and social context, and transcends a purely technical/scientific evaluation. This paper focusses on the systematisation of knowledge on technical/scientific sustainability evaluation, by addressing critical decision-making elements focussed on by domain experts. We make a distinction between integrated assessment and SA. Our systemic approach outlines how to move from integrated assessment to SA. The fundamental differences involved concern three levels: ontological, methodological and epistemological. We present a novel methodological framework for SA, based on a literature meta-review of multi-scale and multi-purpose appraisal methodologies, models and indicators. SA is essentially a structured procedure encompassing different field-specific analytical methods and models, for specific applications and decision contexts. External inputs to the methodology are “values” considered in the analysis and boundaries defined, including the relevant sustainability framework. Internal methodological elements comprise approach to be adopted (e.g. “what-if” vs. “what-to”), scenario design and analytical models and measurable indicators for an operational analysis. Methods to quantify uncertainty are key ingredients of the assessment framework. The paper highlights the relevance of and policy challenges for SA development, with due attention for applicability in real-world decision contexts.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e7007fe624b0c68e2bc0784b0e0c91f77cf254a

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Citations in the corpus

Education for Sustainable Development: A Systemic Framework for Connecting the SDGs to Educational Outcomes (2019, background): “Thus, criteria and standards associated with sustainability competences’ evaluation, collection of reliable data and use of standardised methods to compare values across scales and benchmarks are needed to assess them [85], and can now be easier developed, informed by the framework’s previous steps.”
Are Local Food Chains More Sustainable than Global Food Chains? Considerations for Assessment (2016, background): “While the papers in this special issue will give the readers more detailed insights into the sustainability of specific food chains, this paper has tried to illustrate how “localness” and “globalness” are related to sustainability, thus laying the ground for “effective” sustainability assessment [19”
Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives (2017, background): “Future direction for developing methods and tools should help the scientific community to move from approaches based on isolated disciplines towards inter/trans-disciplinarity and a holistic/systematic perspective in order to address emergent issues related to sustainability problems [77].”
A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste (2017, background): “In an assessment context, the values that the assessor deems important are implicit in (i) the problem framing and (ii) the choice of value metrics; the measurable quantities chosen to represent the dimensions and aspects of value of interest (Sala et al., 2015).”