Sustainability Assessment: Criteria, Processes and Applications

About this book

Traditional environmental assessment (EA) focuses on mitigating negative effects, achieving true sustainability demands that eacha new undertaking make a positive contribution to deisrable and durable futures. This onerous goal can only be achieved if decision makers are able to consciously and publicly specify and use sustainability-centred criteria to justify options and to weigh trade offs.

The book covers all aspects of the core requirements of sustainability including the creation of basic criteria, handling trade-offs, practicalities in application, implications for process design and uses in decision-making, as well as examining the range of tools and innovative examples available to assist implementation of sustainability assessment.

Contents

Preface: Matchmaking (Environmental Assessment and Sustainability); Beginnings: Stumbling Towards Sustainability Assessment; Assessment: Thirty-some Years of Environmental Assessment; Sustainability: The Essentials of the Concept; Practice: Sustainability in Illustrative Initiatives; Criteria: Sustainability Requirements as Core Criteria for Evaluations and Decisions; Trade-offs: Facing Conflict and Compromise; Processes: Designing and Using Sustainability Assessment Processes; Implementation: Sustainability Assessment Applications and Implications; Continuations: What May Lie Ahead; Bibliography, Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Robert B. Gibson is Professor of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and editorial board chair of Alternatives Journal: Canadian Environmental Ideas and Action