Measuring Sustainability - Tools for Sustainable Project Implementation

In response to changing societal expectations and to gain competitive advantage, many businesses today have made public commitments to sustainability. The challenge is to translate such commitments into concrete actions at all levels of an organization ? from corporate and local operations to individual projects.

For an engineering project, implementing sustainability requires an understanding of what sustainability means and how it applies specifically to the project. Key sustainability issues are determined by various factors, including corporate strategy, local concerns, and potential positive and negative impacts from the project. A sustainability planning and performance management process developed by the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI), termed the Metrics Navigator™, can be adapted to identify and prioritize issues most relevant to a project and develop appropriate performance indicators and metrics. Once a prioritized set of environmental, social, and economic indicators is developed, it can be used as input to decision-support and to monitor project performance.

This paper will provide case histories on the use of sustainability indicators to support sustainable project implementations. They include applications in environmental impact analysis (EIA), product development, and technology selection for environmental projects. Results will illustrate how sustainability performance indicators support the identification of project benefits, trade-offs, and concrete actions in implementing the sustainability commitments.