Chalmers Conferences, LCM 2013

GAPS IN ASSESSING SUSTAINABILITY AND PROPOSAL OF A TIERED APPROACH
Sabrina Neugebauer, Ya-Ju Chang, Matthias Finkbeiner

Last modified: 2014-09-11

Abstract


Sustainability is one of the important topics in nowadays societies, but the assessment of sustainability is still in its early stage. This is partly substantiated by the lack of a consistent framework. Besides that available indicators are often on different levels within the three dimensions. Another problem occurs with regard to the data availability. Although for the environmental dimension usually sufficient data are available, gaps are identified for the social and economic dimension. The experience shows that dealing with environmental or sustainable impacts is a continuous process. Thus a tiered approach is proposed starting with “basic” indicators for all sustainability dimensions. Different levels are defined including indicators according to the background, available data and trade-off between theory and practice.

Keywords


sustainability assessment; sustainable indicators; tiered approach

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