The quest for sustainable development is for the individual person largely conditioned by personal endowments and natural and social context. The mass of individual behaviours determines how the collective future unfolds, which in turn affects contexts. How such futures might unfold can be explored in a mix of qualitative story-telling and quantitative modelling, also known as scenarios. Many (world) futures scenarios have been constructed since one of the first ones, The Limits to Growth report (1971), was published. Their names reflect the underlying worldviews. The worldview framework can explicitly be used to link dominant values and beliefs to probable events and pathways, with the use of computer models. It should start with the narrative of Modernity and an investigation of counternarratives. It gives an impression of what humanity can expect in the coming century, and the potential overshoot-and-collapse risks. It can shape the agenda of sustainability science. In the end, however, it is primarily for the individual human being to (re)orient towards a more sustainable way of life and a corresponding state of consciousness and maturity.

This chapter presents tools that focus on products and processes. Specifically, the chapter moves from the assumption that a bioeconomy is unsustainable by definition. Its sustainability (and superiority with respect to the fossil-based economy) has to be proved in a rigorous way, making use of improved methodologies and scientifically sound assessment tools. To this end, this chapter provides an overview of a harmonised approach for an environmental (LCA), social (SLCA), and economic (LCC) assessment of the sustainability of bio-based products and processes – taking into due consideration elements like end-of-life options as well as indirect land use change associated with the market penetration of bio-based products.

This chapter presents Sustainability Solution Spaces for Decision-Making (SSP) as an integrative method for assessing sustainability. The SSP represents the room to manoeuvre in the system at hand so that it can develop sustainably. The approach fulfils (1) systemic criteria; (2) normative criteria; and (3) procedural criteria. It provides a consistent set of targets and considers the systemic relations among the indicators representing the city-region. This gives the decision-makers concise guidelines for sustainable decisions and makes them aware of the associated trade-offs. SSP can be pursued following a participatory and an expert approach. Whereas the expert approach requires high quality of data, preferably either over time or over a large number of cities, the participatory approach is more flexible and can deal with qualitative data. That is, the expert approach is appropriate for comparing large sets of cities with each other, clustering and providing benchmarks for specific city types, and delivering general indications where policy development is required. The participatory approach might be particularly useful for assessing the impact of a specific project or analysing a specific sector, such as mobility or housing, in depth.

Sustainability assessment aims to operationalise the popular but ambiguous concept of sustainability in the analysis of concrete problems and in decision-making situations. However, instead of being a strictly defined methodology, sustainability assessment is a field of science and practice that covers a range of possible tools and processes. To give an introduction to the topic, in this chapter we first place sustainability assessment in its societal and scientific context, and then proceed to discuss its definitions, characteristics, and current limitations based on a review of state-of-the-art literature. Furthermore, we propose a general framework of the dimensions of sustainability assessment, which makes a distinction between the assessment process itself and the broader contextual factors that influence the design of individual applications of sustainability assessment. The framework is meant to identify in a comprehensive manner the concepts, questions, and choices that a thorough design of a sustainability assessment will encounter.

This chapter engages with existing literature and case studies to examine current challenges and ways forward for the sustainability assessment of urban agriculture. It identifies current conceptualisations of urban agriculture, and sustainability assessment methods, and discusses them in the light of normative, systemic, and procedural dimensions of sustainability assessment. The diversity of urban agriculture and its presence in different urban contexts worldwide, represent challenges for sustainability assessment. This chapter shows that there is a paucity of assessment methods that are both specifically developed for urban agriculture and flexible enough to be applicable for different forms of urban agriculture in the Global North and South. Sustainability assessment of agriculture has usually focused on agriculture for market production in relatively stable rural contexts. However, urban agriculture poses challenges of diversity, multi-functionality, contested framings, and knowledge integration, which manifest more acutely in urban than in rural contexts, and which many existing sustainability assessment approaches and methods fail to address. The chapter discusses opportunities to move the practice of sustainability assessment of urban agriculture forward. These include the adoption of inter- and transdisciplinary research strategies, and a critical and reflexive approach to urban agriculture practices, power relations, social norms, and institutional conditions.

This chapter provides an insight into the role of systems science for sustainability assessment. In the first part, we present seven axioms that have been derived from system-theoretical perspectives and show their relevance for sustainability assessment. Following these axioms, we propose a way to structure and analyse systems following four system characteristics: (1) system boundary and interactions with the external environment; (2) purpose, goals, and associated decision-making drivers and criteria for the system; (3) system structure (subsystems, elements, and their interactions), dynamics, and emerging behaviour; and (4) system information, outcomes monitoring, and learning. These four characteristics were applied to study, first, the historical development of the energy system analysis and, second, an Australian urban systems-transformation initiative. The systems-analysis framework presented provides a good basis for putting the elements of a system analysis into their broader context, and designing purposeful interventions. Especially for more transformational change, the alignment of stakeholder values, institutional arrangements, and available knowledge become key leverage points.

The Integrative Concept of Sustainable Development (ICoS) was developed through an intensive process in order to operationalise the guiding rules of sustainable development in an interdisciplinary team. Through its three general sustainability goals and 25 sustainability rules, ICoS establishes that indicators are part of a step-wise, systematic, and consistent construction that links theoretical abstraction to deliberative action: the political and societal practice of sustainable development (Barton & Kopfmüller, 2012, p. 84). The application of the concept is presented through two examples: a completed project in Santiago de Chile, and a project currently being developed, which will enable the calculation of regional sustainable energy balances.

Given the persistent challenges of governing natural resources sustainably, there is an urgent need for comprehensive sustainability assessments that enable holistic understanding of current and future development scenarios. To spur necessary action, these assessments must also foster joint learning among multiple stakeholders. In this chapter, we present the ‘Sustainability Wheel’, a mixed-method, dialogue-based approach for assessing the sustainability of resource governance systems. The approach combines the transparent identification of general sustainability principles, the regional contextualisation of these as subprinciples/indicators, and the scoring of the indicators based on deliberative dialogue in interdisciplinary teams, drawing on shared knowledge and understandings. Using the approach to examine sustainable water governance in the Swiss Alps, we demonstrate its effectiveness in integrating multiple perspectives, including those deriving from qualitative and quantitative research, and in facilitating communication with stakeholders. Furthermore, we explore its application to urban systems.

A wealth of indicators and indicator sets, structured in the form of standards (e.g., ISO, OECD, SDG Index, etc.), have been developed and proposed over the past decades to define and measure urban sustainability. Unfortunately, literature studies confirm that there is a lack of knowledge systematisation for such indicator sets in the sustainability assessment domain. In this chapter, we present and describe a formal representation of knowledge about sustainability indicators and their interrelationships, through the development of a domain ontology. To increase the potential for its adaptability and reuse, as well as to facilitate its continuous redevelopment, we make the developed ontology available online, through a dedicated web portal.

The conceptualisation of urban systems is a crucial step in their assessment. It not only involves identifying the constituent parts of an urban system, but also directly influences the definition of appropriate measurement tools, evaluation criteria, and stakeholders for the assessment. Choices related to conceptualisation therefore have strong normative implications. Hence, there is a need to develop ways to analyse and compare different approaches in terms of their relative emphases, strengths, and weaknesses. The purpose of this chapter is to respond to this need by developing analytical tools that build on four contrasting metaphors commonly used for describing cities. The set of four metaphors (machine, organism, network, and melting pot) used for this purpose were selected based their ability to capture different existing scientific perspectives on cities. Through elaborating the implications that each of the four metaphors carries for the different aspects of an urban system, our work produced two frameworks, one for analysing approaches to conceptualising urban systems in general, and another directed more specifically at analysing approaches to the assessment of urban systems. In addition to their analytical functions, these frameworks can also provide the language that enables communication between different scientific approaches to urban systems.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of four Participatory Multi-Criteria Approaches (PMCAs) usually applied in sustainability assessments (SMCE, MCM, 3-SPM, and INTEGRAAL). Such approaches are presented in detail and subsequently compared to each other according to three elementary yet crucial questions: who assesses?; what is assessed?; and how is it assessed? The results outline potential synergies and theoretical incompatibilities between the four approaches. The analysis also supports future PMCA applications when choosing one particular approach according to: key meta-principles (i.e., epistemological stance, methodological emphasis); logistical constraints (e.g., time, budget); local idiosyncrasies (e.g., pertinent geographical scales, power asymmetries); and organisational factors.