Sustainability Assessment Methods Research Articles

Urban planning and sustainable cities

This article is a review of scholarly works on planning for urban futures with special reference to sustainable cities. The article aims to produce an update of the challenges and current perspectives on urban planning, sustainability and development across the globe. As informed by research from the academic and scientific communities, the review provides the prospective directions and trends for securing a sustainable urban future. Within the sustainable cities discourse, recent intellectual inquiry has centred on the conceptualisation and knowledge production in creating sustainable cities. Though the scope of the review may not be exhaustive, the purpose is to articulate the current progress in the research front concerning concepts and definitions on sustainable cities, planning and methods for urban sustainability development and assessment. The ultimate goal is to provide local authorities, practitioners and/or city governments with some perspective and guidance in working towards urban sustainability in the future.

The methodology of the S-ERP system employment for small and medium manufacturing companies

Abstract The sustainability of a manufacturing company is a crucial element in its development process and for providing the company with a competitive advantage. Company managers should asses all three sustainable dimensions in order to determine the processes or actions needed to be carried out within a company with the aim of increasing the company’s sustainability. Motivated by the lack of a method of sustainability assessment (SA), integrated with processes carried out and supported by the ERP system within a company, a methodology for implementing the S-ERP system in small and medium manufacturing companies was developed. The proposed new approach to integrate implementation of the ERP system and assess its sustainability includes: (1) integration of the criteria for sustainability manufacturing and the main business processes within a company, supported by the ERP system, (2) quantitative indicators for assessing sustainability, (3) the assessment of sustainability, linked to the ERP system.

Assessing Industrial Biotechnology Products with LCA and Eco-Efficiency.

Biotechnology is applied in many industrial areas and uses microorganisms, enzymes, or precursors replacing chemicals to produce goods, including chemicals, plastics, food, agricultural and pharmaceutical products, and energy carriers from renewable raw materials and increasingly also from waste from agriculture and forestry (BIOPRO Baden-Württemberg GmbH, Facts and Figures. Biotechnologie.de. https://www.biooekonomie-bw.de/en/articles/dossiers/industrial-biotechnology-biological-resources-for-industrial-processes/ , 2013). In comparison with conventional processes, industrial biotechnology processes often run under relatively mild reaction conditions, moderate temperatures, and the use of aqueous media. They might reduce in general the energy requirements and the number of by-products. Since product concentration and formation rate are often very low, the resulting products need to be purified and recovered in marketable quantities in a process that is referred to as downstream processing. Product quantity can also be increased by optimizing the manufacturing processes or biocatalysts used (OECD, the application of biotechnology to industrial sustainability. www.oecd.org/sti/biotechnology , 2001).In this context, developing a sustainable bio-based economy that uses eco-efficient processes is one of the key strategic challenges for the twenty-first century. Decisions in the technology development are often supported by sustainability assessment results using different types of sustainability assessment methods. In the last decades, we developed different types of sustainability assessment methods evaluating aspects of economy, ecology, and society to support decision-making processes. We show in this chapter how different types of questions can be answered, how more sustainable solutions can be identified, and how this information can be used for marketing and research activities.

New Methods for Sustainable Circular Buildings

Cities can and should be an open field to sustainable circular guidelines since its scale complexity becomes an impact (positive or negative) over the environment as deep as its dimension. On this scenario, construction industry aims to develop products that fulfil also functional requirements and at the same time safety and durability during all the life cycle phases, promoting reversible buildings to avoid constructions obsolescence and recourses’ waste. Most of the Building Sustainability Assessment methods require detail in the input data, hampering their usability at early design stages. So, the paper presents two complementary methods that are being developed to promote early stage sustainability through both sustainability design decision-making guidance and assessment of investment willingness and affordability. The first method enables project teams to compare design alternatives and verify which is the most sustainable choice and alerts them how sustainability concerns are linked to all design criteria, constraints and decisions. The second method is a cost-benefit analysis method to analyse and compare building solutions that consider the stakeholders’ investment willingness and market availability. These new approaches can lead to a more sustainable built environment and contribute to more circular economy since it allows thinking on reversible and transformable buildings since the early design stages choosing solutions closer to the building stakeholders’ investment willingness and the users’ affordability.

Using BIM to optimise and assess the energy efficiency category of SBToolPT-H

The current method for assessing the two indicators of the Energy Efficiency category of the Building Sustainability Assessment method SBToolPT-H (P7: Primary energy, P8: In-situ energy production from renewables) is rather time-consuming. The assessment requires many values that need to be calculated manually or with specific spreadsheets, whenever a design is proposed. When a design alteration is introduced, the whole process needs to be repeated, which leads to designers to be discouraged to develop this task. This research explores the use of the Building Information Modelling (BIM) software – Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Green Building Studio (GBS) – to assess the Energy Efficiency category. The purpose is to find a more efficient assessing method, encouraging and supporting designers to optimise their projects. More efficient methods can contribute to more sustainable constructions and to decrease the construction industry’s environmental impact. To explore if Revit and GBS can streamline the assessment of this SBToolPT-H category, a case study was carried out. A reference building was created which complied with all the current Portuguese regulations. The reference building was then modelled in Revit and submitted to an energy analysis using GBS. The results showed for indicator P7, that the use of GBS and Revit streamlines the assessment by faster extraction of information thanks to the 3D-model and the energy analysis software. However, the assessment could be made even more efficient if the software and national regulations were more matched such as conformity of units and analysed parameters. Concerning indicator P8, the results showed clearly that using GBS is a rather efficient process.

Understanding the Linkages: A Dynamic Sustainability Assessment Method and Decision Making in Manufacturing Systems

Traditional sustainability assessment conducts life cycle economic, environmental, and social impact assessment individually and utilizes multi-criteria or optimization methods for decision making. This method is usually challenged by systems thinkers who believe that system is an integrated whole with elements interconnected and the analysis requires continuous learning and understanding. In manufacturing systems, there is still a lack of understanding on linkages of economic, environmental and social activities and impacts, especially the interactions based on manufacturing system behaviors. This hinders manufacturer strategic and tactic decision making at unit process, shopfloor, and enterprise levels. This articles proposes a dynamic sustainability assessment method based on system dynamics modeling of behaviors and systemically connects economic, environmental, and social impact assessments in manufacturing system sustainability assessment. The method identifies sustainable manufacturing problems with characteristics. Creative method design from systems science is used to incorporate knowledge from system dynamics, risk assessment, sustainability assessment, and life cycle engineering to tackle complex problem, and design the method structure. A case study demonstrated that modeling based method is able to assist manufacturing practitioners and researchers understand the underlying economic, environmental, and social relations in manufacturing systems.

Computer-supported collaborative knowledge building using a sustainability assessment framework and Microsoft Teams

Ashby’s sustainability assessment method provides a systematic framework for dealing with complex, multidisciplinary problems. It explicitly addresses many desired graduate attributes, and is an excellent framework to provide scaffolding for computer-supported collaborative knowledge building. This paper describes experience using Ashby’s method in conjunction with the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform in a third-year group sustainability assessment project. Students found Teams to be effective and easy to use, and the resulting group reports demonstrated development and application of most CEAB graduate attributes, particularly professionalism, impact on society and the environment, and life-long learning.

Is the evolution of building sustainability assessment methods promoting the desired sharing of knowledge amongst project stakeholders?

Building sustainability assessment methods (BSAM’s) seek to help project stakeholders understand the predicted and actual sustainability performance of their buildings but are often applied reactively and isolated from project decisions. The last decade has seen BREEAM at the forefront of evolving assessment practice towards a framework approach to help shape project decisions and promote stakeholder learning. The research explores the nature and extent this transition is being realized in practice within four case studies applying BREEAM spanning a 15-year period. Process and knowledge mapping techniques are applied to explore the flow of knowledge required to enable sustainable decisions, stimulate the sharing of understanding, mediation of views and to promote learning amongst stakeholders. Evidence suggested that when applied in progressive projects that the flow of knowledge is strongest when supported by sustainability leadership, a framework approach aligned with project management, an improvement and engagement culture and a strategy for promoting knowledge flow. As practice matures care is needed to ensure engagement remains high and stakeholders are not isolated from the flow of knowledge as projects increasingly rely on sustainability advisors thus losing the opportunity to learn and shape decisions.

Testing and Verification of a New Corporate Sustainability Assessment Method for Manufacturing: A Multiple Case Research Study

This paper aims at answering the question of how to design a theoretically sound corporate sustainability assessment (CSA) method that can strengthen the ability of manufacturing companies to contribute to global sustainable development (SD). In our effort to answer this question, we conduct a case study to test a newly designed CSA method to develop assessment tools for each of four different case companies. The method combines criteria-based indicators development with qualitative system dynamics modeling based on mental models of decision-makers. This strategy ensures a holistic approach to what corporate sustainability and sustainable manufacturing are. The paper is intended to serve, first of all, as a practical guide to the development of CSA tools. The scientific value of the method is discussed in terms of how it assists in the development of a tool that provides the potential to overcome shortcomings of existing approaches to sustainability assessment and to embrace the complexity of the sustainability concept. From the case study results, we demonstrate the capability of the new method by showing how it satisfies scientific requirements to sustainability assessment and fulfills functions of CSA. We also show how it may overcome some of the observed limitations of existing CSA tools.

A Framework for Development and Communication of Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessment Methods

SummaryAn absolute environmental sustainability assessment (AESA) addresses whether a production or consumption activity can be considered environmentally sustainable in an absolute sense. This involves a comparison of its environmental pressure to its allocated environmental carrying capacity. AESA methods have been developed in multiple academic fields, each using their own set of concepts and terms with little communication across the fields. A recent growing interest in using AESA methods for decision support calls for a better common understanding of the constituents of an AESA method and how it can be communicated to scientific peers and to potential users.With this aim, we develop a framework for AESA methods, composed of a succession of four assessment steps and involving six methodological choices that must be made by the method developer or the user. We then use the framework to analyze and compare five selected AESA methods that focus on the release of phosphorus and nitrogen to the environment. In this manner, we show that the framework is able to systematically differentiate AESA methods that initially appear to be similar. Intended users of the framework include (1) method developers communicating new AESA methods to academic peers or potential method users and (2) researchers comparing a group of existing AESA methods and communicating their differences to their peers and to potential users looking for guidance on method selection.

Methodology to Identify and Prioritise the Social Aspects to Be Considered in the Design of More Sustainable Residential Buildings—Application to a Developing Country

The priorities in the design of more sustainable buildings are quite dependent on the specific social context. In developing countries, the sustainability concept and priorities in the residential buildings sector are quite different from the ones of the developed countries, since there are still basic needs to answer. Therefore, this research is aimed at contributing to a better understanding of the concept of social sustainability in the residential building sector of the developing countries. A methodology to define and prioritise the social sustainability indicators is proposed and applied in the context of Palestine. The presented methodology is based on the sustainability indicators of international standards, on the most well know building sustainability assessment methods and in the analysis of their application to a specific context. It includes a methodology to prioritise the list of social indicators, by considering the expectations of two groups of building stakeholders: designers and building users. At the end, this research proposes a framework of social aspects to consider in the design of more sustainable residential buildings in West Bank, Palestine that is composed of twenty-one indicators, distributed among six sustainability categories and ranked according to their weight in the overall of sustainability level.

Assessing Sustainable Food Systems Governance in EU’s Outermost Regions—The Case of the Azores in Portugal

The European Union’s (EU) remote rural areas undergo unique organizational challenges to counteract geopolitical, economic, and environmental constraints and engage in a competitive global food market. A one size fits all recipe to mend specific issues has also proven inefficient and led policy-makers to acknowledge the importance of implementing sustainable landscape governance to promote rural development. This paper inquires what are the challenges and opportunities food systems must adopt in a sustainable landscape governance approach, based on a qualitative research work carried out in the Azores Region (Portugal) in 2016. Data was gathered via eleven semi-structured interviews to key stakeholders and participatory observation in six events related to the management of the Azores’ food system. A grounded theory method structured qualitatively research participants’ perceptions about the Region’s food regime. This analysis is hereby furthered according to the four criteria proposed by the sustainable landscape governance assessment method. Our results indicate the lack of coordination among actors, institutions and policies in the Azores Region could be counteracted by promoting inclusive participation and integrated knowledge to attain cohesive, sustainable, and efficient outcomes at the landscape level. The methodology has proven to be adequate and instrumental in identifying sustainable landscape governance issues in other food systems.

Evaluation of the social dimension of sustainability in the built environment in poor rural areas of China

ABSTRACTResearch on the experiences of the recent tremendous rural construction and restructuring in China show that the social dimension of sustainability is crucial for the success of rural development. However, most conventional built environmental sustainability assessment tools (BESATs) are mainly focussed on environmental sustainability and building performance. There are to date no useful or complete assessment methods of social sustainability in the rural built environment. This study reviews the concept of the social dimension of sustainability and its application in architecture. Several existing BESATs are analysed and compared to identify their features and gaps in the assessment of social sustainability. From this, a series of indicators of social sustainability in the built environment are developed and discussed in the context of the current situation and challenges in poor rural areas in China. Compared with conventional BESATs, the social dimension of sustainability assessment method (SDM) not only considered indoor environmental quality but also covered a variety of issues from human physiological needs to psychological needs. More importantly, it can be used to guide the practice of rural construction from the initial stage by providing a systematic understanding and point-by-point instructions.

Measuring Country Sustainability Performance Using Ensembles of Neuro-Fuzzy Technique

Global warming is one of the most important challenges nowadays. Sustainability practices and technologies have been proven to significantly reduce the amount of energy consumed and incur economic savings. Sustainability assessment tools and methods have been developed to support decision makers in evaluating the developments in sustainable technology. Several sustainability assessment tools and methods have been developed by fuzzy logic and neural network machine learning techniques. However, a combination of neural network and fuzzy logic, neuro-fuzzy, and the ensemble learning of this technique has been rarely explored when developing sustainability assessment methods. In addition, most of the methods developed in the literature solely rely on fuzzy logic. The main shortcoming of solely using the fuzzy logic rule-based technique is that it cannot automatically learn from the data. This problem of fuzzy logic has been solved by the use of neural networks in many real-world problems. The combination of these two techniques will take the advantages of both to precisely predict the output of a system. In addition, combining the outputs of several predictors can result in an improved accuracy in complex systems. This study accordingly aims to propose an accurate method for measuring countries’ sustainability performance using a set of real-world data of the sustainability indicators. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) technique was used for discovering the fuzzy rules from data from 128 countries, and ensemble learning was used for measuring the countries’ sustainability performance. The proposed method aims to provide the country rankings in term of sustainability. The results of this research show that the method has potential to be effectively implemented as a decision-making tool for measuring countries’ sustainability performance.

Investigation of regional conditions and sustainability indicators for sustainable product development of building materials

With the increasing importance of the sustainable product development of the building materials for the sustainable building and its industries, this study structured the existing sustainability assessment methods based on a common information structure, which was classified by its categories, aspects, and indicators. Sustainability indicator lists were structured into 25 categories, 88 aspects which 25% of those were product or product and regional related ones. Most of the sorted indicators related to products were difficult to be applied at the early phase of product development due to the lack of required level of information. Meanwhile, the indicators could be a supportive tool for the later phase of product development, for the production planning step as an example. Since the regional conditions showed the link between the sustainability performance during the building's operational phase, the conditions may serve as a proxy information to guide during the earlier product development phase.

Adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference system approach for urban sustainability assessment: A China case study

AbstractUrbanization, especially in developing countries, has led to numerous concerns, such as air pollution, traffic congestion and habitat destruction. Within this context, it is important to evaluate urban development as sustainable, and various sustainability assessment methods have been developed, including fuzzy logic approaches. However, predefined fuzzy rules and simple linear membership functions were used, which are largely based on the knowledge of subject experts. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce an adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) approach for urban sustainability assessment. With collected training samples from the Urban China Initiative, and the ANFIS approach was used to rank 185 selected cities in China. The results show that the ANFIS approach is appropriate for assessing urban sustainability, and the nonlinear membership functions fit the training samples better than the linear membership functions. Further discussion indicates that future research on sustainability assessment should be more integrated.

Sustainability assessment of wastewater reuse alternatives using the evidential reasoning approach

Abstract Wastewater reuse is a necessity especially in arid and semiarid regions. Assessing wastewater reuse applications and the required tertiary treatment technologies with regard to sustainable development issues is a multi-criteria decision making problem that involves a number of conflicting objectives and various types of uncertainties. In this study, the evidential reasoning (ER) approach which is a multi-criteria decision making method for dealing with problems having both quantitative and qualitative criteria under uncertainties, is used for prioritizing the wastewater reuse applications as well as wastewater treatment technologies. The proposed ER approach for sustainability assessment of wastewater reuse alternatives consists of five main steps: 1. Identification of potential wastewater reuse alternatives (including wastewater reuse applications and tertiary treatment technologies). 2. Determining contributing criteria in the assessment (with regard to economic, environmental, technological, and sociological/cultural aspects of wastewater reuse) and identifying the relative weights of the criteria using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). 3. ER distributed modeling framework for the identified wastewater reuse criteria. 4. Recursive ER algorithm for aggregating multiple identified wastewater reuse criteria. 5. Utility interval based ER ranking method which is designed to compare and rank the alternatives. In order to increase the precision of the assessment, life cycle costs and life cycle assessment are used as tools to assess the costs and environmental impacts of tertiary treatment technologies. To show the applicably of the proposed scheme, it has been applied to a wastewater treatment plant located at south of Tehran, Iran. Agricultural irrigation, artificial recharge of groundwater, and industrial usages are considered as the main potential wastewater reuse application alternatives and 20 tertiary treatment technologies are proposed to meet the wastewater reuse standards. Among the wastewater reuse applications, artificial recharge of groundwater, Tehran oil refinery, Shamsabad and Parand industrial parks, and agricultural irrigation are the alternatives with the highest utility numbers and priorities. Food security, lack of public acceptance, value added, and implementation cost, with relative weights of 0.33, 0.18, 0.17 and 0.17, respectively, are the criteria with the highest effect on prioritization of the wastewater reuse application alternatives. Moreover, it is known that MBR + UV, UF + RO + UV, UF + RO + DF + Cog/Floc + UV, and CW + UV are the most sustainable tertiary treatment alternatives for wastewater reuse in artificial recharge of groundwater, cooling tower & other industries, boiler, agricultural irrigation, respectively. Life cycle costs and environmental impacts of the tertiary treatment technologies with relative weights of 0.27 and 0.1978, respectively, have the highest influence in this prioritization. In addition, it is indicated that the life cycle costs for MBR + UV, UF + RO + UV, UF + RO + DF + Cog/Floc + UV, and CW + UV, range from $1799 to $5714, $3903 to $7050, $4685 to $8350, and $1171 to $1733, respectively, which make them the tertiary treatment alternatives with lowest life cycle costs. MBR + UV and CW + UV with estimated environmental impacts of 390 and 86.8 pt, respectively, are among the most suitable tertiary treatment alternatives. UF + RO + UV and UF + RO + DF + Cog/Floc + UV with estimated environmental impacts of 623 and 695 pt, respectively, have the highest estimated environmental impacts among the treatment technologies for reuse in industries, however, having better assessment grades with regard to other criteria (e.g. life cycle costs) makes them the most suitable alternatives for reuse in industries. This study shows that the ER approach provides a flexible and systematic method for sustainability assessment of wastewater reuse alternatives.

Effective integrated frameworks for assessing mining sustainability.

The objectives of this research are to review existing methods used for assessing mining sustainability, analyze the limited prior research that has evaluated the methods, and identify key characteristics that would constitute an enhanced sustainability framework that would serve to improve sustainability reporting in the mining industry. Five of the most relevant frameworks were selected for comparison in this analysis, and the results show that there are many commonalities among the five, as well as some disparities. In addition, relevant components are missing from all five. An enhanced evaluation system and framework were created to provide a more holistic, comprehensive method for sustainability assessment and reporting. The proposed framework has five components that build from and encompass the twelve evaluation characteristics used in the analysis. The components include Foundation, Focus, Breadth, Quality Assurance, and Relevance. The enhanced framework promotes a comprehensive, location-specific reporting approach with a concise set of well-defined indicators. Built into the framework is quality assurance, as well as a defined method to use information from sustainability reports to inform decisions. The framework incorporates human health and socioeconomic aspects via initiatives such as community-engaged research, economic valuations, and community-initiated environmental monitoring.

Environmental, economic and exergetic sustainability assessment of power generation from fossil and renewable energy sources

Energy conversion systems have assumed a crucial role in current society. The threat of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the growing world energy demand ask for a more sustainable way of electricity production, eg, by using renewable energy sources, by improving the conversion efficiency and/or by controlling power plant emissions. Despite the relationship between exergy and sustainability stated in literature, exergy losses are usually not considered when comparing systems and energy sources for power generation. The exergetic sustainability assessment method named Total Cumulative Exergy Loss (TCExL) has been used to assess several systems for electricity production, ie, a coal-fired power plant, a coal-fired power plant including carbon capture and storage, a biomass-fired power plant, an offshore wind farm and a photovoltaic park. The results of the TCExL method have been compared with an environmental sustainability indicator, ie, the overall ReCiPe endpoint indicator and the economic indicator named Present Worth Ratio. The offshore wind farm is the best system from the exergetic and environmental point of view. The photovoltaic park is the system with the second-best scores. However, from the economic viewpoint including subsidy by the Dutch government, the photovoltaic park performs better than the wind farm system and the system that performs best is the biomass-fired power plant. Without subsidy, only the coal-fired power plant without carbon capture and storage is profitable. The exergetic sustainability scores of the coal-fired and biomass-fired power plants are similar, but from the environmental sustainability viewpoint, the biomass-fired power plant performs better than both coal-fired power plants. As the results of environmental and economic sustainability assessments strongly depend on models, weighting factors, subsidy, market prices, etc, while the results of the exergetic sustainability assessment do not, it is recommended that the exergetic sustainability be taken into account when assessing the sustainability of power generation and other technological systems.

Towards a comprehensive absolute sustainability assessment method for effective Earth system governance: Defining key environmental indicators using an enhanced-DPSIR framework

Reflecting the growing interest in the concept of absolute sustainability, this research defines an absolute sustainability assessment method (ASAM) with three key characteristics: (i) assessment of a comprehensive range of environmental impacts in absolute terms; (ii) evaluation of these impacts at an early stage in impact pathways; and (iii) the capacity to assess these impacts at multiple economic levels. To that end, using an enhanced Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (eDPSIR) framework, this study systematically classified the environmental indicators reported in the Planetary Boundaries (PBs), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by mapping them on to a network of cause-effect chains developed in previous work, and extended to include the areas of protection in LCA. It was found that twelve major environmental problems could be defined as key central nodes in this causal network, and that the PBs and LCA evaluated many of these environmental problems at an early stage in the causal network while the SDGs generally addressed similar problems at the latter end of the causal network. Six of these environmental problems were addressed in all three approaches (PBs, LCA and SDGs) and the others were addressed in one or two approaches. An associated (but incomplete) set of absolute environmental sustainability indicators were identified that are already available in one or more of the three approaches; some of these indicators require further methodological development in order to support the advancement of an ASAM for effective Earth system governance.