Applying Full Cost Accounting to Sustainability Assessment
Almost everyone can agree that sustainability is an essential requirement for new building design but with around 900 indicators of sustainability available, how can the cost of incorporating it into new urban developments be calculated?
SUE MOT, an EPSRC funded consortium of academic, industrial and community focused partners, has developed a comprehensive sustainability accounting system for urban developments that can be used to analyse the environmental, social and economic costs and benefits at different stages in the building life cycle.
SUE MoT undertook a rigorous analysis of the existing 900 sustainability indicators and supplemented their findings with a survey of practitioners. They were then able to isolate 17 impacts that represent the most significant parts of the sustainability landscape.
The Integrated Sustainability Assessment Toolkit (ISAT) creates a generic, integrated assessment framework which will bring together current sustainability assessment metrics, models and tools. The coherent, comprehensive toolkit assesses the economic, social and environmental dimensions of different contexts of the urban environment and unlike previous tools, has been created with stake-holders in mind.
The Sue-MoT team then developed a full cost accounting framework for assessing the economic, environmental and social impacts of urban developments (UD-SAM). The framework is based on a successful Sustainability Assessment Model first developed for use in the petrochemical industry.
SUE-MoT’s approach will contribute to urban development that is fit for the sustainability journey ahead.
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Finding a Common Currency for Sustainability Assessment
SUE MOT, an EPSRC funded consortium of academic, industrial and community focused partners, has undertaken a comprehensive review of biophysical and cost-based models of urban developments to try and find a common, single currency for sustainability assessment.
The researchers from Dundee, Glasgow Caledonian, Loughborough and St Andrews Universities, found that that no single tool can successfully address the three dimensions of sustainability simultaneously.
The relative merits of emergy, exergy, ecological footprint and contingent valuation methods have been evaluated but the complexity of urban systems render the applicability of a single metric for sustainability assessment challenging and stems from the fact that these metrics are based on reductionism and not on holism.
Emergy or Embodied solar energy is the available energy that was used during the production of a product or service. Biophysical models quantify resource consumption and subsequent effects on the environment through a natural science perspective.
However, Biophysical metrics cannot address the social issues connected to sustainability. Exergy analysis can be used to examine how to use energy more efficiently, while monetary tools such as cost/benefit analysis essentially capture human preferences on different sustainability issues.
Ecological Footprints measure the equivalent amount of productive land that has been appropriated for the production of a given or service.
The research team has concluded that a reductionist approach is inappropriate for assessment of the sustainability of urban developments and conducted a case study of the UK expanding upon the three aforementioned metrics.
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Environmental Equity in Urban Developments
Greater equity both amongst people alive today and between the current and future generations is critical for sustainable development and the concept of environmental equity is one with which we are all familiar. Yet as we scramble to avoid leaving the legacy of a wasted planet to our ancestors, environmental injustices are already taking place among the current generation.
Disadvantaged communities often suffer the greatest environmental burdens such as noise and air pollution associated with developments like factories and waste treatment centres, often because, critically, these communities are excluded from the urban design and planning process.
The SUE-MoT consortium, which brings together experts from Dundee, Glasgow Caledonian, Loughborough and St Andrews Universities, seeks to develop a framework that will allow urban decision-makers in the UK to examine the environmental equity implications of a proposed urban development and promote community involvement in that process.
The consortium has developed a framework with associated assessment procedures that will help urban decision-makers examine the environmental equity implications of a proposed urban development. The framework has been developed to be compatible with various existing impact assessment procedures and focuses on five key impacts: Noise and Vibration, Air Quality, Community Severance, Property Encroachment, and Visibility.
SUE-MoT’s approach will contribute to urban development that is fit for the sustainability journey ahead.
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Integrated Sustainability Assessment Toolkit (ISAT)
The pressure is on for developers, architects and planners to make sustainability a top priority in new urban developments. But with 670 sustainability assessment indicators to choose from, how should it actually be measured? And which model of sustainability should stake-holders be working towards?
SUE MOT, an EPSRC funded consortium of academic, industrial and community focused partners, has developed an all-encompassing tool that will bring some much needed uniformity to urban sustainability.
The Integrated Sustainability Assessment Toolkit (ISAT) creates a generic, integrated assessment framework which will bring together current sustainability assessment metrics, models and tools. The coherent, comprehensive toolkit assesses the economic, social and environmental dimensions of different urban environments and unlike previous tools, has been created with stake-holders in mind.
The ISAT allows users to choose the tools that are best suited to assessing their specific needs and integrates their outputs to provide a holistic sustainability assessment, helping them to select sustainable, cost-effective and context-specific solutions over the whole life cycle of an urban development.
SUE-MoT’s approach will contribute to urban development that is fit for the sustainability journey ahead.
For more information visit http://sue-mot.org/research/work-package-1 or contact Prof. Malcolm Horner at r.m.w.horner@dundee.ac.uk .
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