Certification systems for sustainable neighbourhoods: What do they really certify?

Certification systems for sustainable neighbourhoods started to emerge around a decade ago. This study analysed the content, structure, weighting and indicators of two established certification systems for sustainable urban development – BREEAM Communities and LEED for Neighborhood Development. Several limitations of these systems were identified: both have a bias for procedure and feature indicators over indicators that assess actual performance; performance demands are set according to a relative understanding of sustainable development; the focus is on internal sustainability, while upstream and downstream impacts of construction are disregarded; the number and distribution of mandatory issues do not cover essential sustainability aspects; and the disproportionately large number of non-mandatory issues makes benchmarking difficult and signals that sustainability aspects are exchangeable. Altogether, this means that an area can be certified without being sustainable. Moreover, the lack of continuous development of certification requirements in the systems means that they risk exerting a conservative effect on urban development, rather than pushing it forward.     

Promoting corporate sustainability through sustainable resource management: A hybrid decision-making approach incorporating social media data

Previous studies revealed triple bottom line cannot entirely cover the concept of corporate sustainability. This study thus uses sustainable resource management (SRM) to improve corporate sustainability (CS) performance considering the socio-environmental, socio-economical, and eco-efficiency aspects. In this study, the vague set (VS) theory and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method are integrated as a hybrid decision-making tool by which social media data can be transformed into entropy weights. The results indicate eco-efficiency and society should be prioritized to improve the corporate sustainability performance. Specifically, the aspects should be promoted through encouraging environmental innovation, redesigning consumers' offer, raising support of the institutions and policy measures, and organizing synergetic involvement. The contributions of this study are three-fold: (i) establishing a comprehensive framework for guiding firms make effective improvements; (ii) developing a hybrid VS-TOPSIS method to process the assessment data and social media information and address the interrelationships; (3) identifying the decisive SRM criteria to precisely guide the Chinese automobile industry towards CS under severe resource constraints.     

New Internet search volume-based weighting method for integrating various environmental impacts

Weighting is one of the steps in life cycle impact assessment that integrates various characterized environmental impacts as a single index. Weighting factors should be based on the society's preferences. However, most previous studies consider only the opinion of some people. Thus, this research proposes a new weighting method that determines the weighting factors of environmental impact categories by considering public opinion on environmental impacts using the Internet search volumes for relevant terms. To validate the new weighting method, the weighting factors for six environmental impacts calculated by the new weighting method were compared with the existing weighting factors. The resulting Pearson's correlation coefficient between the new and existing weighting factors was from 0.8743 to 0.9889. It turned out that the new weighting method presents reasonable weighting factors. It also requires less time and lower cost compared to existing methods and likewise meets the main requirements of weighting methods such as simplicity, transparency, and reproducibility. The new weighting method is expected to be a good alternative for determining the weighting factor.     

Relationship between green public procurement criteria and sustainability assessment tools applied to office buildings

Green Public Procurement (GPP) plays an important role in facing the challenge of reducing the environmental impacts from construction sector-related products, services and works, and creating environmental and innovative value for society in favour of a greener and more sustainable economy. The European Commission recently developed GPP criteria for the “office buildings” category. In parallel, Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA) tools help estimate a building's impact on the environment based on a life cycle approach. Many of the aspects and measurable indicators included in BSA tools are clearly related to the criteria covered by GPP. However, other important ones are missing and should be integrated to ensure green procurement initiatives. This study critically reviews the GPP criteria proposed for office buildings and crosschecks them with the sustainability indicators included in three BSA tools to reinforce the GPP framework for the office buildings sector. It provides, on the one hand, an evaluation of the rate of improvement achieved in the tools when applying GPP criteria and, on the other, a proposal for a weighting system for awarding points to the offers in tenders. The results will help contracting authorities to introduce more objectivity into the tendering process and to make informed decisions while evaluating bidders' proposals.     

An Optimization Model for Integrated Coastal Management: Development and a Case Study Using Italy’s Comacchio Municipality

In this paper, I develop an optimization model for integrated coastal management in which decisions arise from an area-based algorithm that minimizes predicted damage caused by beach erosion and inshore flooding, while accounting for economic, social, and environmental losses. The model favors the involvement of stakeholders in coastal management, but does not use complicated assessment procedures for non-economic indicators or relative weights to combine economic, social, and environmental indicators. Instead, the integration between economic activities or properties and the environmental status and landscape is represented objectively and non-linearly by referring to initial and sustainability conditions, combined with budgetary and environmental constraints. The model successfully accounted for both human and environmental dynamics by depicting delayed effects, neighborhood externalities, and feedback effects. It calculated a single optimal value for each integrated coastal management strategy, which permitted the support of future decisions and the evaluation of past decisions. The model’s insights were based on reliable estimates, with reliability determined by calculating the confidence level. The model was successfully applied to Italy’s Comacchio coastal municipality, where it revealed the priorities for optimal beach nourishment, dune fixation, and residential and holiday housing development based on budget constraints, beach losses, flood damage, pollution impacts, and land-use constraints.     

Review of sustainability indices and indicators: Towards a new City Sustainability Index (CSI)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss conceptual requirements for a City Sustainability Index (CSI) and to review existing major sustainability indices/indicators in terms of the requirements. The following indices are reviewed: Ecological Footprint (EF), Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), Dashboard of Sustainability (DS), Welfare Index, Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, City Development Index, emergy/exergy, Human Development Index (HDI), Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI), Environmental Policy Index (EPI), Living Planet Index (LPI), Environmentally-adjusted Domestic Product (EDP), Genuine Saving (GS), and some applications of composite indices or/and multivariate indicators to local or regional context as case studies. The key conceptual requirements for an adequate CSI are: (i) to consider environmental, economic and social aspects (the triple bottom line of sustainability) from the viewpoint of strong sustainability; (ii) to capture external impacts (leakage effects) of city on other areas beyond the city boundaries particularly in terms of environmental aspects; (iii) to create indices/indicators originally for the purpose of assessing city sustainability; and (iv) to be able to assess world cities in both developed and developing countries using common axes of evaluation. Based on the review, we conclude that it is necessary to create a new CSI that enables us to assess and compare cities' sustainability performance in order to understand the global impact of cities on the environment and human life as compared with their economic contribution. In the future, the CSI will be able to provide local authorities with guidance toward sustainable paths.     

Software for Sustainability Assessment: a Case Study in Quang Tri Province,Vietnam

Sustainable development is a widespread concept. Indicator selection and sustainability assessment are basic methods to analyse the sustainable development process. This study aims to develop a software application to select indicators and to allocate weightings to the indicators and the sub-indexes, so that they can be listed in a sustainability assessment. The Visual Basic software is used to develop a software package based on Delphi, analytic hierarchy, normalization and combination processes. Software for sustainability assessment was developed. Thirty-five indicators are selected as a first step of which eight health indicators and eight environmental ones and their sub-indexes are given weightings. The indicators are normalized. Sub-indexes are combined into a composite sustainable development index. The model is validated showing the ‘main features’ of the sustainability situation on health and environmental aspects in the Quang Tri province during the period 2000–2005. The results support the decision-making process of the competent authorities.     

A model for the sustainable selection of building envelope assemblies

The aim of this article is to define an evaluation model for the environmental impacts of building envelopes to support planners in the early phases of materials selection. The model is intended to estimate environmental impacts for different combinations of building envelope assemblies based on scientifically recognised sustainability indicators. These indicators will increase the amount of information that existing catalogues show to support planners in the selection of building assemblies.To define the model, first the environmental indicators were selected based on the specific aims of the intended sustainability assessment. Then, a simplified LCA methodology was developed to estimate the impacts applicable to three types of dwellings considering different envelope assemblies, building orientations and climate zones. This methodology takes into account the manufacturing, installation, maintenance and use phases of the building. Finally, the model was validated and a matrix in Excel was created as implementation of the model.     

A more comprehensive and quantitative approach to corporate sustainability

This study proposes a new quantitative methodology and extendable framework to assess corporate sustainability more comprehensively and to capture interrelationships across the multiple domains of sustainability. A case study from the mining industry is presented to demonstrate the application of this new approach and its ability to extract meaningful insights regarding the company's progress towards sustainability. The comprehensive sustainability target method (CSTM) is a novel extension to an existing environmental burden sustainability assessment technique with additional focus on impacts within and across the societal and social justice domain. CSTM extends sustainability assessment recognizing planetary limits from human activity and relevant societal and community-based targets by formalizing assessment to include social and environmental beneficial impacts, as well as the interdependencies between the economic, environmental and societal domains. Outcomes from the mining industry case study reveal new insights into the sustainability of corporate operations as the comprehensive assessment framework provides a deeper and more extensive evaluation as compared to traditional sustainability assessments and corporate disclosures. In addition to maximal earth carrying capacity estimates for environmental burden targets, this study proposes that companies should assess sustainability for minimal limits applying to social beneficial impacts and maximal limits for social burden impacts. The overall theoretical construct and framework are presented to illustrate the robustness and extendibility of the technique to broadly incorporate various sustainability domains, assessment boundaries, and temporal considerations.     

Evaluating impacts of development and conservation projects using sustainability indicators: Opportunities and challenges

There has been an increased interest in using sustainability indicators for evaluating the impacts of development and conservation projects. Past and recent experiences have shown that sustainability indicators can be powerful tools for measuring the outcomes of various interventions, when used appropriately and adequately. Currently, there is a range of methods for applying sustainability indicators for project impact evaluation at the environment–development interface. At the same time, a number of challenges persist which have implication for impact evaluation processes especially in developing countries. We highlight some key and recurrent challenges, using three cases from Kenya, Indonesia and Brazil.In this study, we have conducted a comparative analysis across multiple projects from the three countries, which aimed to conserve biodiversity and improve livelihoods. The assessments of these projects were designed to evaluate their positive, negative, short-term, long term, direct and indirect impacts. We have identified a set of commonly used sustainability indicators to evaluate the projects and have discussed opportunities and challenges associated with their application. Our analysis shows that impact evaluation processes present good opportunities for applying sustainability indicators. On the other hand, we find that project proponents (e.g. managers, evaluators, donors/funders) face challenges with establishing full impacts of interventions and that these are rooted in monitoring and evaluation processes, lack of evidence-based impacts, difficulties of measuring certain outcomes and concerns over scale of a range of impacts.We outline key lessons learnt from the multiple cases and propose ways to overcome common problems. Results from our analysis demonstrate practical experiences of applying sustainability indicators in developing countries context where there are different prevailing socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions. The knowledge derived from this study may therefore be useful to a wider range of audience who are concerned with sustainable integration of development and environmental conservation.     

Eco-Efficiency of Electric and Electronic Appliances: A Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

Several papers have studied the eco-efficiency of manufacturing systems to address strategic socioeconomic issues in the context of sustainability analysis. Their goal has been to take into account not only environmental impact aspects throughout the whole life cycle but also to incorporate the associated economic value as well, thus, giving a comprehensive vision of both factors. This paper focuses on different commonplace household electric appliances, comparing their eco-efficiency computed using a data envelopment analysis model. We consider the retail price as a measure of the product’s economic value and the ecopoint LCA score as the assessment of its environmental impact. We conclude that cell phones and the bulky analyzed appliances have the highest eco-efficiency scores, whereas the rest would require a more environmentally friendly redesign and/or an increase in their perceived value to improve their eco-efficiency.     

Sustainability impact assessment to improve food security of smallholders in Tanzania

The objective of this paper was to assess the sustainability impacts of planned agricultural development interventions, so called upgrading strategies (UPS), to enhance food security and to identify what advantages and risks are assessed from the farmer's point of view in regards to social life, the economy and the environment. We developed a participatory methodological procedure that links food security and sustainable development. Farmers in four different case study villages in rural Tanzania chose their priority UPS. For these UPS, they assessed the impacts on locally relevant food security criteria. The positive impacts identified were mainly attributed to increased agricultural production and its related positive impacts such as increased income and improved access to necessary means to diversify the diet. However, several risks of certain UPS were also indicated by farmers, such as increased workload, high maintenance costs, higher competition among farmers, loss of traditional knowledge and social conflicts. We discussed the strong interdependence of socio-economic and environmental criteria to improve food security for small-scale farmers and analysed several trade-offs in regards to UPS choices and food security criteria. We also identified and discussed the advantages and challenges of our methodological approach. In conclusion, the participatory impact assessment on the farmer level allowed a locally specific analysis of the various positive and negative impacts of UPS on social life, the economy and the environment. We emphasize that only a development approach that considers social, economic and environmental challenges simultaneously can enhance food security.     

SHARE IT: Co-designing a sustainability impact assessment framework for urban food sharing initiatives

Urban food systems must undergo a significant transformation if they are to avoid impeding the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goals. One reconfiguration with claimed sustainability benefits is ICT-mediated food sharing – an umbrella term used to refer to technologically-augmented collective or collaborative practices around growing, cooking, eating and redistributing food – which some argue improves environmental efficiencies by reducing waste, providing opportunities to make or save money, building social networks and generally enhancing well-being. However, most sustainability claims for food sharing have not been evidenced by systematically collected and presented data. In this paper we document our response to this mismatch between claims and evidence through the development of the SHARECITY sustainability Impact assessment Toolkit (SHARE IT); a novel Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) framework which has been co-designed with food sharing initiatives to better indicate the impact of food-sharing initiatives in urban food systems. We demonstrate that while several SIA frameworks have been developed to evaluate food systems at the urban scale, they contain few measures that specifically account for impacts of the sharing that initiatives undertake. The main body of the paper focuses on the co-design process undertaken with food sharing initiatives based in Dublin and London. Attention is paid to how two core goals were achieved: 1) the identification of a coherent SIA framework containing appropriate indicators for the activities of food sharing initiatives; and 2) the development of an open access online toolkit for in order to make SIA reporting accessible for food sharing initiatives. In conclusion, the co-design process revealed a number of technical and conceptual challenges, but it also stimulated creative responses to these challenges.     

Environmental sustainability of textiles and apparel: A review of evaluation methods

Environmental sustainability, which considers the tradeoff between economic productivity and environmental impact, is an important perspective in product decisions for textiles and apparel companies. Evaluating environmental sustainability for textile products has been difficult because of the complexity in the production and consumption processes. This paper provides a review of the methods that can be potentially used for measurement of environmental sustainability. These methods include the life cycle assessment, environmental footprint, eco-efficiency and Higg index. This paper reviewed the methodologies of these approaches and discussed about their limitations against the unique context of the textiles and apparel industry. We proposed a couple of directions where future research should be focused on, which may lead to ultimate solutions.     

A delphi-style approach for developing an integrated food/non-food system sustainability assessment tool

Sustainability assessment is a complex field and its uptake amongst agricultural producers limited. Furthermore, the scope of current sustainability assessment tools does not extend to systems in which food production is integrated with production of non-food biomass (e.g. agroforestry). Participatory approaches to tool development offer a means to overcome the subjectivity of researcher-led tool design and thus the potential to increase relevance and engagement. In this work we develop a Delphi-style methodology as a means to produce a sustainability assessment tool suitable to assess and feedback on an integrated food/non-food system. Using a widely accepted agricultural sustainability framework and an existing farm sustainability assessment tool as a base, stakeholders were engaged with across six countries and multiple stakeholder groups to identify key indicators to be added to the tool. The methodology developed is described in detail, framed in the setting of this tool development process but providing a novel framework applicable to any situation where indicators must be developed for a complex issue of interest across multiple perspectives and stakeholder groups. Feedback and learning from the experience is provided. It was found that, contrary to some opinion, the inclusion of a face-to-face discussion round as part of the Delphi procedure provides a valuable means for information exchange and a move towards consensus amongst stakeholders. By using a ‘snowball’ approach to the in person discussions, it appears too that the loss of the voices of more socially retiring individuals can be avoided. Final levels of agreement vary substantially across the different areas of sustainability, with indicators in some areas (e.g. environmental integrity) proving much less controversial than others (e.g. social wellbeing). Despite this, the methodology effectively reaches a level of consensus amongst diverse stakeholders sufficient to guide the selection of sustainability indicators with a good level of confidence.     

Transitions-based strategic environmental assessment

Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is emerging as an important tool for sustainability transitions, yet there has been limited research conceptualizing transitions-based SEA. If SEA's primary goal is to facilitate strategic change and guide decision-processes toward sustainability, an assessment framework that accounts for the multi-dimensional factors and relationships influencing transition processes seems highly relevant. This paper advances the transitions-based SEA design – an approach to SEA that is focused on the institutional environment and policy context for the development of strategic initiatives including institutional commitments, supporting policies, and opportunities. We do so within the context of energy transitions, bridging strategic planning theories, decision making, and transition management. Building on existing SEA frameworks that advance strategic thinking, the paper presents the foundational principles and strategic questions to be asked in a transitions-based SEA design. The framework was developed based on a review of sustainability transitions and SEA literature supplemented by expert input. The SEA design focuses on the guiding vision for transitions, the institutional context and governance arrangements, opportunities and risks of proposed sustainability pathways, progress indicators for on-going transition management, and impacts of the exogenous landscape. The framework defines a new functionality for SEA, pushing the boundaries of what SEA can achieve, and should accomplish, as a strategic assessment tool while also challenging conventional thinking and practice beyond its application to policies, plans and programs.     

Sustainability principles in strategic environmental assessment: A framework for analysis and examples from Italian urban planning

This paper presents a framework for analysing the degree of consideration of sustainability principles in Strategic environmental assessment (SEA), and demonstrates its application to a sample of SEA of Italian urban plans. The framework is based on Gibson's (2006) sustainability principles, which are linked to a number of guidance criteria and eventually to review questions, resulting from an extensive literature review. A total of 71 questions are included in the framework, which gives particular emphasis to key concepts, such as intragenerational and intergenerational equity. The framework was applied to review the Environmental Report of the urban plans of 15 major Italian cities. The results of this review show that, even if sustainability is commonly considered as a pivotal concept, there is still work to be done in order to effectively integrate sustainability principles into SEA. In particular, most of the attention is given to mitigation and compensation measures, rather than to actual attempts to propose more sustainable planning decisions in the first place. Concerning the proposed framework of analysis, further research is required to clarify equity concerns and particularly to identify suitable indicators for operationalizing the concepts of intra/inter-generational equity in decision-making.     

Comparative analysis of methods for integrating various environmental impacts as a single index in life cycle assessment

Previous studies have proposed several methods for integrating characterized environmental impacts as a single index in life cycle assessment. Each of them, however, may lead to different results. This study presents internal and external normalization methods, weighting factors proposed by panel methods, and a monetary valuation based on an endpoint life cycle impact assessment method as the integration methods. Furthermore, this study investigates the differences among the integration methods and identifies the causes of the differences through a case study in which five elementary school buildings were used. As a result, when using internal normalization with weighting factors, the weighting factors had a significant influence on the total environmental impacts whereas the normalization had little influence on the total environmental impacts. When using external normalization with weighting factors, the normalization had more significant influence on the total environmental impacts than weighing factors. Due to such differences, the ranking of the five buildings varied depending on the integration methods. The ranking calculated by the monetary valuation method was significantly different from that calculated by the normalization and weighting process. The results aid decision makers in understanding the differences among these integration methods, and, finally, help them select the method most appropriate for the goal at hand.     

A Strategic Project Appraisal framework for ecologically sustainable urban infrastructure

Actors in the built environment are progressively considering environmental and social issues alongside functional and economic aspects of development projects. Infrastructure projects represent major investment and construction initiatives with attendant environmental, economic and societal impacts across multiple scales. To date, while sustainability strategies and frameworks have focused on wider national aspirations and strategic objectives, they are noticeably weak in addressing micro-level integrated decision making in the built environment, particularly for infrastructure projects. The proposed approach of this paper is based on the principal that early intervention is the most cost-effective and efficient means of mitigating the environmental effects of development projects, particularly macro infrastructure developments. A strategic overview of the various project alternatives, taking account for stakeholder and expert input, could effectively reduce project impacts/risks at low cost to the project developers but provide significant benefit to wider communities, including communities of future stakeholders. This paper is the first exploratory step in developing a more systematic framework for evaluating strategic alternatives for major metropolitan infrastructure projects, based on key sustainability principles. The developed Strategic Project Appraisal (SPA) framework, grounded in the theory of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), provides a means of practically appraising project impacts and alternatives in terms of quantified ecological limits; addresses the neglected topic of metropolitan infrastructure as a means of delivering sustainability outcomes in the urban context and more broadly, seeks to open a debate on the potential for SEA methodology to be more extensively applied to address sustainability challenges in the built environment. Practically applied and timed appropriately, the SPA framework can enable better decision-making and more efficient resource allocation ensuring low impact infrastructure development.     

机动车环保检验机构信用评价体系模型的构建

根据机动车环保检验相关指标的性质差异,将机动车环保检验机构信用评价模型设计为目标层、准则层、指标层3个层次,涵盖16个评价指标。应用层次分析法,构造目标成对比较矩阵,计算各层次权重,求得各指标对信用评价的影响程度,从而建立信用评价指标体系模型。量化分析结果显示,准则层中质量管理、文明服务的权重分别为0.506 5、0.265 1,对评价结果影响较大;而机构管理、规范作业的权重分别为0.142 4、0.086 1,对评价结果影响较小。