Sustainability Assessment: Criteria and Processes

Many governments express commitments to sustainability, yet until now assessing sustainability in projects, plans, programmes and policies has been largely limited to traditional environmental assessment (EA) with an imperfect attempt to staple on biophysical and socio-economic considerations. While traditional EA focuses on mitigating negative effects, achieving true sustainability demands that each new undertaking make a positive contribution to desirable and durable futures. This onerous goal can only be achieved if decision makers are able to consciously and publicly specify and use sustainability-centred criteria to justify options and to weigh trade-offs. Sustainability Assessment covers all aspects of the core requirements of sustainability including the creation of basic criteria, handling trade-offs, practicalities in application, implications for process design and uses in decision-making, as well as examining the range of tools and innovative examples available to assist implementation of sustainability assessment.