Sustainability assessment of projects

Sustainability (triple bottom line) assessment allows individual project options to be evaluated and ranked against diverse environmental, social and financial objectives. It may be used in a variety of settings including assessing options in the planning process; and prioritising project proposals within a capital budgeting program.

A common problem with sustainability assessment of projects is that social or environmental effects that are difficult to monetarise accurately, receive less attention than financial criteria. Approaches adopted by The Middle Way use the technique of multi criteria analysis, alongside BCA and CEA, to address this imbalance. We seek to involve a cross section of internal and key external stakeholders in the assessment process.

The basic steps are:

• Statement of objectives
• Identification and definition of options
• Selection of sustainability criteria and weighting where appropriate
• Screening of options to identify any deal breakers
• Assessment of options
• Reporting