An overview of sustainability assessment methodologies

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Economics of natural resources and the environment

Ecological risk assessment of heavy metals in sediment and human health risk assessment of heavy metals in fishes in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River basin

Sustainability assessment is being increasingly viewed as an important tool to aid in the shift towards sustainability. However, this is a new and evolving concept and there remain very few examples of effective sustainability assessment processes implemented anywhere in the world. Sustainability assessment is often described as a process by which the implications of an initiative on sustainability are evaluated, where the initiative can be a proposed or existing policy, plan, programme, project, piece of legislation, or a current practice or activity. However, this generic definition covers a broad range of different processes, many of which have been described in the literature as 'sustainability assessment'. This article seeks to provide some clarification by reflecting on the different approaches described in the literature as being forms of sustainability assessment, and evaluating them in terms of their potential contributions to sustainability. Many of these are actually examples of 'integrated assessment', derived from environmental impact assessment (EIA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA), but which have been extended to incorporate social and economic considerations as well as environmental ones, reflecting a 'triple bottom line' (TBL) approach to sustainability. These integrated assessment processes typically either seek to minimise 'unsustainability', or to achieve TBL objectives. Both aims may, or may not, result in sustainable practice. We present an alternative conception of sustainability assessment, with the more ambitious aim of seeking to determine whether or not an initiative is actually sustainable. We term such processes 'assessment for sustainability'. 'Assessment for sustainability' firstly requires that the concept of sustainability be well-defined. The article compares TBL approaches and principles-based approaches to developing such sustainability criteria, concluding that the latter are more appropriate, since they avoid many of the inherent limitations of the triple-bottom-line as a conception of sustainability.

Conceptualising sustainability assessment

Safety analysis in process facilities: Comparison of fault tree and Bayesian network approaches

Quantitative risk analysis (QRA) is a systematic approach for evaluating likelihood, consequences, and risk of adverse events. QRA based on event (ETA) and fault tree analyses (FTA) employs two basic assumptions. The first assumption is related to likelihood values of input events, and the second assumption is regarding interdependence among the events (for ETA) or basic events (for FTA). Traditionally, FTA and ETA both use crisp probabilities; however, to deal with uncertainties, the probability distributions of input event likelihoods are assumed. These probability distributions are often hard to come by and even if available, they are subject to incompleteness (partial ignorance) and imprecision. Furthermore, both FTA and ETA assume that events (or basic events) are independent. In practice, these two assumptions are often unrealistic. This article focuses on handling uncertainty in a QRA framework of a process system. Fuzzy set theory and evidence theory are used to describe the uncertainties in the input event likelihoods. A method based on a dependency coefficient is used to express interdependencies of events (or basic events) in ETA and FTA. To demonstrate the approach, two case studies are discussed.

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Brian Veitch

Papers

Fault and event tree analyses for process systems risk analysis: uncertainty handling formulations.

Analyzing system safety and risks under uncertainty using a bow-tie diagram: An innovative approach

Life cycle iNdeX (LInX): a new indexing procedure for process and product design and decision-making

Methodology for computer aided fuzzy fault tree analysis

A state-of-the-art review of fate and transport of oil spills in open and ice-covered water