Enhancement of roundtable on sustainable palm oil (RSPO): qualitative to quantitative assessment tool

Abstract

Sustainability assessment is an appraisal process which takes a pluralistic and iterative approach. It is conducted for supporting decision-making and policy in broad scenario (environmental, economic and social perspective) and viewed as a vital instrument to aid in the shift towards sustainability. Sustainability assessment transcends a technical or scientific evaluation. The growth of indicators in numerous fields has influenced sustainability assessment methodologies to a great extent. In general, two broad approaches for sustainability can be distinguished, top-down and bottom-up. Despite the abundance and diversified procedures for evaluating sustainability, indicators based assessment is one of the most widely used platform. Existing sustainability assessments schemes typically provide various interpretations involving various quantification methods, hence difficult to be integrated. Subsequently, this paper provides an integrative analysis of existing sustainability assessment approaches. It not only offers a very valuable insight on the features of existing sustainability assessment schemes, but also highlighting gaps to a certain extent.