Sustainability Assessment

by Gibson, Robert B.; Hassan, Selma; Holtz, Susan; Tansey, James; Whitelaw, Graham

• ISBN13: 9781844070510
• ISBN10: 1844070514
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-30
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

* The first book to tackle the complexities of sustainability assessment and provide practical solutions * Comprehensive analysis, guidance, and criteria for impact assessment professionals and policymakers at all levels and in all circumstances * Applicable to the new EU Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive and other international assessment systems Many governments express commitments to sustainability, yet until now assessing sustainability in projects, plans, programs, and policies has been largely limited to traditional environmental assessment (EA) with an imperfect attempt to staple on biophysical and socio-economic considerations. While traditional EA focuses on mitigating negative effects, achieving true sustainability demands that each new undertaking make a positive contribution to desirable and durable futures. This onerous goal can only be achieved if decisionmakers are able to consciously and publicly specify and use sustainability-centered criteria to justify options and to weigh trade-offs. Sustainability Assessment 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 decisionmaking as well as examining the range of tools and innovative examples available to assist implementation of sustainability assessment.

Author Biography

Robert B. Gibson is professor of environment and resource studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and Editorial Board Chair of Alternatives Journal.

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes	p. vii
Preface	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations	p. xiv
Beginnings: Stumbling Towards Sustainability Assessment	p. 1
Beginning in Labrador	p. 1
Specifying the higher test	p. 11
Assessment: Thirty-some Years of Environmental Assessment	p. 14
Growing up in a difficult world	p. 14
Basic and more advanced approaches	p. 15
Development stages and growth trends	p. 21
Maturing assessment and emerging sustainability	p. 36
Sustainability: The Essentials of the Concept	p. 38
A necessary and difficult idea	p. 38
Old sustainability	p. 39
Groundwork for a new sustainability	p. 41
The second coming of sustainability	p. 47
Debating the concept	p. 51
The essentials	p. 59
Initial implications for assessment regimes	p. 62
Practice: Sustainability in Illustrative Initiatives	p. 66
Theory and practice	p. 66
Stories	p. 67
Lessons from the stories	p. 82
Criteria: Sustainability Requirements as the Basis for Decision Making	p. 88
The need for decision criteria	p. 88
Requirements for progress towards sustainability	p. 95
Characteristics, strengths and limitations of the requirements as decision criteria	p. 115
Trade-offs: Facing Conflict and Compromise	p. 122
Pursuing sustainability in a messy world	p. 122
Unavoidable trade-offs	p. 123
Trade-offs of substance and process	p. 125
Trade-off rules	p. 130
Beyond the rules	p. 138
Processes: Designing Sustainability Assessment Regimes	p. 142
How versus what	p. 142
Basic process principles	p. 144
Components of a sustainability assessment law	p. 145
Transitions	p. 162
Decisions: Applying Sustainability-based Criteria in Significance Determinations and Other Common Assessment Judgements	p. 165
Decisions and significance	p. 165
Applying sustainability-based criteria in significance judgements	p. 168
Continuations: The Way Ahead	p. 180
Proliferation	p. 180
The fundamentals and the variations	p. 181
Getting there	p. 185
References	p. 189
Appendices	p. 206
Index	p. 248
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