Sustainability assessments are important instruments for shaping sustainable development in all domains. However, not every assessment approach is fitting for every assessment situation. The fit between approaches and situations is rarely considered in the current practice of approach selection. In this thesis, a situation-oriented Multi-Criteria Decision-Making framework to support systematic selection decisions is developed and effects of selection on assessment results are investigated.

Currently the writing on the subject is limited and comprises, for the most part, guidance documents and completed assessments.

Methods in Sustainability Science: Assessment, Prioritization, Improvement, Design and Optimization presents cutting edge, detailed methodologies needed to create sustainable growth in any field or industry, including life cycle assessments, building design, and energy systems. The book utilized a systematic structured approach to each of the methodologies described in an interdisciplinary way to ensure the methodologies are applicable in the real world, including case studies to demonstrate the methods. The chapters are written by a global team of authors in a variety of sustainability related fields. Methods in Sustainability Science: Assessment, Prioritization, Improvement, Design and Optimization will provide academics, researchers and practitioners in sustainability, especially environmental science and environmental engineering, with the most recent methodologies needed to maintain a sustainable future. It is also a necessary read for postgraduates in sustainability, as well as academics and researchers in energy and chemical engineering who need to ensure their industrial methodologies are sustainable. - Provides a comprehensive overview of the most recent methodologies in sustainability assessment, prioritization, improvement, design and optimization - Sections are organized in a systematic and logical way to clearly present the most recent methodologies for sustainability and the chapters utilize an interdisciplinary approach that covers all considerations of sustainability - Includes detailed case studies demonstrating the efficacies of the described methods

Thirty years ago, the UN report Our Common Future placed sustainable development firmly on the international agenda. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development takes the ethical foundations of Our Common Future and builds a model that emphasizes three equally important moral imperatives – satisfying human needs, ensuring social justice, and respecting environmental limits. This model suggests sustainability themes and assigns thresholds to them, thereby defining the space within which sustainable development can be achieved. The authors accept that there is no single pathway to the sustainable development space. Different countries face different challenges and must follow different pathways. This perspective is applied to all countries to determine whether the thresholds of the sustainability themes selected have been met, now and in the past. The authors build on the extensive literature on needs, equity, justice, environmental science, ecology, and economics, and show how the three moral imperatives can guide policymaking. The Imperatives of Sustainable Development synthesizes past reasoning, summarizes the present debate, and provides a clear direction for future thinking. This book will be essential reading for everyone interested in the future of sustainable development and in the complex environmental and social issues involved.

Provides guidelines for assessing the sustainability of urban systems including theory, methods and case studies.

Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (ELCA) that was developed about three decades ago demands a broadening of its scope to include lifecycle costing and social aspects of life cycle assessment as well, drawing on the three-pillar or ‘triple bottom line’ model of sustainability, which is the result of the development of the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). LCSA refers to the evaluation of all environmental, social and economic negative impacts and benefits in decision-making processes towards more sustainable products throughout their life cycle. Combination of environmental and social life cycle assessments along with life cycle costing leads to life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA). This book highlights various aspects of life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA).

Sustainable development is one of the most influential visions guiding future societies. Encompassed within its vision are various domains where improvements are desirable such as, social equity, environmental degradation, climate change. In the work towards sustainable development firms, government authorities and individuals face various practical challenges tied to these sustainability domains. When facing these challenges, they may implement sustainability solutions, that is, solutions that are framed in the context of contributing to sustainable development. This thesis deals with a particular sub-set of such sustainability solutions, namely integrative and multi-functional solutions. These solutions are characterized by the ability to provide different functions through value creation within several different sustainability domains and require organisations, or units of organisations, to further integrate material, energy and informational flows in order to implement the solution. Integrative and multi-functional solutions may play an important part in the transition towards sustainable societies since the integration of material, energy and informational flows may bring with it synergistic benefits. Furthermore, the contribution of these solutions to several different sustainability domains reduces the risk of problem shifting, and it may be more cost-efficient to have one multi-functional sustainability solution than to have one for each sustainability- related challenge. However, if integration and multi-functionality are desirable characteristics of future socio-technological systems, we need ways to systematically assess them and facilitate their implementation. When it comes to the assessment, there is a need to find an assessment methodology that can handle capturing the synergistic benefits and multiple functions of such solutions. Furthermore, the methodology also has to conform to the value pluralism inherent to sustainable development. Dealing with this value pluralism when trying to assess which solution, among many, to implement can be challenging as comparative judgements have to handle potentially conflicting value orientations, goals, empirics and ontologies. As for the facilitation of their implementation, integrative and multi-functional solutions tend to be more difficult—or at least different—to implement than traditional single-minded solutions since they require traditionally separate organisations to cooperate Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to understanding the process of implementing integrative and multi-functional solutions. Specifically the thesis explores how to select indicators for assessment, how assessments may aid decision-makers to deal with the value pluralism of sustainable development when making comparative judgements and how to strengthen the internal capacity of groups of actors to engage in collective action. Regarding the selection of indicators, the thesis suggests two different pathways. Either one may base indicator selections on stakeholder discussions, where stakeholders come to a consensus around which indicators are important to assess, or one may base indicators on operationalising pre-defined sustainability objectives: namely, sorting, contextualising and reformulating pre-defined sustainability objectives so that they fit the purpose of the assessment. A mix of both pathways is also possible, in other words, using both stakeholder discussions and the operationalisation of pre-defined sustainability objectives to motivate and justify the selection of indicators. As for how assessments may aid decision-makers, the thesis advocates for a discursive approach based on the primacy of decision support tools over decision-making tools. Meaning that the tools should support informed decisions but not make them for the decisionmaker. Here, contributions are made in the form of motivations for the discursive, qualitative approach to decision-making and exemplify how decision support tools may be designed, and a method is presented and developed that enables this kind of informed comparative judgements. This method builds on multicriteria decision analysis methodology but makes a few key contributions to the selection of indicators (mentioned previously) and to how to compare different alternatives and judge which of the alternatives is the preferred. Finally, contributions are made to the practice of facilitating integrative and multi-functional solutions through showing how the theory of institutional capacity building can be used to guide design, development and evaluation of interventions aimed at facilitating such solutions. Institutional capacity building represents the ability of groups of actors to engage in collective action, something that seems to be often needed to implement integrative and multi-functional solutions. Historically, this theory has been used to study how different events influenced the capacity of actors to engage in collective action. However, in research performed within the bounds of this thesis, the theory is expanded for use in a proactive manner, thereby contributing with insights and inspiration to others that may seek to facilitate the implementation process of integrative and multi-functional solutions.