Methods for Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability: State‐of‐the Art, Challenges, and Future Developments

Abstract

By now, the term sustainability suffers from being degenerated into a buzzword resulting in an exceptionally large amount and variety of literature. Likely due to this, the dispersal of descriptions, perspectives, and facets regarding sustainability‐assessing methods reveals deficits in terms of theoretical and methodological rigor, novelty, and practical usefulness. Against this background, this article contains an overview of eight selected methods and tools for sustainability assessment. The qualitative review of current research articles concerning energy technologies highlights objectives and purposes, origins, main procedures, fields of application, and examples as well as a critical acclaim for each method. Next to this, several considerations in general such as the role of principles, criteria, and indicators are being illustrated as well as important challenges for measuring sustainability. Thereby, we develop a six‐stage model that supports the choice of an appropriate method for sustainability assessment. In doing so, we derive two fundamental principles, namely “content‐related” features and “performance‐related” features. At the same time, this article underlines the coexistence of various different, highly complex methods, approaches, and perspectives, as well as practical examples to assess sustainability. We evidence an increasing defragmentation and specialization of research on sustainability assessment. Against this background, our findings are likely to foster further theoretical, conceptual, and analytical developments in this research field. This also promotes a customization and the practical value of sustainability assessment methods.

Análisis de las metodologías de valoración empleadas en la inversión pública de proyectos medioambientales: evidencias y aplicaciones para Colombia

“…La revisión realizada contribuye a la cantidad creciente de literatura sobre la sostenibilidad, buscando así proporcionar información útil sobre la aplicabilidad metodológica y sus problemas relacionados con la correcta focalización de los recursos públicos en proyectos de transformación socio-ambiental. Una discrepancia observada entre los métodos tradicionales de costo-beneficio y las técnicas multicriterio ha sido revisada por varios autores (Gasparatos et al, 2008;Baranauskiene & Alekneviciene, 2014;Kleeberg, Schneider & Nippa, 2015) señalando sus pros, contras y complementariedades metodológicas. No obstante, no hay unanimidad absoluta y unicidad en la solución del problema.…”

Sustainability Assessment of Solid Biofuels from Agro-Industrial Residues Case of Sugarcane Bagasse in a Mexican Sugar Mill

“…When searching for methods for sustainability assessment of energy projects, we found out that a large number of studies apply multicriteria analysis methods (MCA) to aggregate sustainability indicators in a single sustainability index [38][39][40][41][42]. This broad application of MCA arises from the multi-dimensional nature of sustainability assessments, which has to make use of indicators of very diverse nature in order to reflect the complexity of the biophysical and socio-economic systems that come into play; condensing into a single value helps to achieve a rational outcome [39], even when stakeholder preferences diverge.…”

“…Discrete MCA types include the AHP mentioned above [44], the multi-attribute analysis theory (MAUT) [42], preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE) [45,46] and the elimination and choice translating reality (ELECTRE) Method [47]. The last two are named overclassifying methods because they reduce the size of the alternatives set by comparing indicators between alternatives [38], dividing the set of alternatives into two subsets depending on the indicators' magnitude differences: more favorable and less favorable alternatives.…”

A Methodological Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of Solid Biofuels Systems

“…Voluntary certification schemes such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) and the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) also set standards. There are also many institutional and academic proposals, which have been analyzed in several reviews [3,5,6]. A systematic search was made to identify the most relevant work related to the objective of this work; it included scientific articles and reviews published in Spanish and English between the years 2000 and 2019.…”